The groups.inf.ed.ac.uk web service is due to be upgraded on July 1st. This will be an upgrade from SL7 to Ubuntu Jammy (similar to homepages and other DICE machines or servers). Like homepages, the most notable changes will be to PHP and Python. OSSL7Ubuntu JammyPython2.73.10PHP7.38.1 Although most pages on groups.inf.ed.ac.uk are static, if yours doesn’t […]

As of today, 29/03/2024, the blog service is now running on Ubuntu Jammy and has been updated to the latest version of WordPress (6.4). The biggest difference is the editor used for pages and posts, but the previous editor can be enabled via the “Classic Editor” plugin. If you notice any blog posts have disappeared […]

You may soon lose access to your University email if you use an old or unmaintained email client. Even if you don’t, you may need to make changes. Microsoft has announced that to improve security, it is changing the way email clients can authenticate to the University email server. This may result in some older […]

The project to replace EdLAN reached another milestone recently, with the completion of the migration of all subnets away from the old EdLAN core routers across to the new EdLAN distribution routers.  There’s now some tidying-up to be done, and the parts which might affect us in Informatics are scheduled for Tuesday 23rd. Specifically, some […]

Singularity container platform is now available on Ubuntu DICE. Singularity is a container platform, perhaps the most well-supported Docker alternative. It allows you to run containers that package up pieces of software in a way that is portable and reproducible. You can build or download pre-built images from external resources (including Docker Hub) and run […]

As you’ll all be aware, the University is tightening up on network security in response to outside threats.    Within Informatics we have also been looking at ways to improve our security, and one area we have identified is that of self-managed machines in offices. For many years we have provided network ports in offices and […]

As you’ll be aware by now, EdLAN is changing, though rather more slowly than was originally anticipated for various reasons, and the way that Informatics connects to it has to change too. Under the old EdLAN, the Informatics network in the central area (Forum, Appleton Tower, Bayes and Wilkie) had a 10Gbps connection to the […]

It’s time for us to arrange to reboot most of our network switches again.  We need to do this for a couple of reasons. The first is that the clocks that they use for management and reporting purposes tick in centiseconds.  That means that they wrap at just under 497 days of uptime, which in […]

As part of the EdLAN replacement project, contractors are working their way round all of the University’s buildings to swap out the wireless access points for new ones.  The Bayes building has already been done (on Tuesday 18th January), and the Informatics Forum is the next one where we’ll see this happen.  This is scheduled […]

We’ve had IPv6 enabled on the “self-managed server” subnets (164 and 197) for quite a while now, and mostly it has been trouble-free.  Recently, however, we’ve had reports of login slowness to some self-managed servers following a system upgrade. What we expect to happen is that your machine will automatically set its IPv6 address based […]