If you use a Mac, this post is for you. I’m asking for the opinions of Mac users. There seem to be a lot of Macs in Informatics. Macs can be configured to access DICE services – for example AFS, printing, backups – but sometimes this can be excessively fiddly or difficult. I’m looking into […]

Over the next few weeks, SL6 DICE desktop computers will start falling asleep when idle. The aim is to make them use less energy. At present most DICE desktops run F13 or SL5 DICE. These computers will not sleep any more than at present. Once they have been upgraded to SL6 they will mostly start […]

Here’s some news: we’ve moved the DICE weekly release from Thursday to Wednesday afternoons. If you’re already tempted to move on, let me explain. Most of the configuration of a DICE machine – what software is installed, who can login, security arrangements, that sort of thing – is handled automatically by our LCFG configuration system. […]

We’ve turned off some of the machines which normally form part of the DICE Beowulf and Hadoop clusters. At the moment the Forum’s server room is running with only one of its UPSes rather than the normal two, so we’ve cut our electricity consumption slightly until we get the second UPS back. One obvious target […]

This post is mainly just to announce that the student lab machines can now be woken from sleep in the way one might reasonably expect: with a key press or mouse click. Previously they could only be woken by pressing the machine’s power button. As the author of the LCFG sleep component which configures these […]