During the recent lockdowns, new working practices have developed which place far less reliance on the printing out of materials. Recognising this, and wishing to reduce the financial and environmental impact of printing across its estate, the University has adopted a policy on sustainable printing, the implementation of which will see printers with low levels […]

The University runs a Research Data Management Service which encompasses all aspects of Research Data Management including recording Data Management Plans, storing active data, sharing data, archiving data and providing forums and training facilities. The main features are: DMPonline Free and open web-based tool to help researchers write data plans DataStore To store data in […]

For many years we have used the OSPF routing protocol to exchange IPv4 and IPv6 routes with the rest of EdLAN as well as internally within Informatics.  As a result of the University’s network replacement project, however, that’s going to have to change as EdLAN adopts a more layered structure.  We’ll continue to use OSPF […]

The BBC news website tells us (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-fife-55979665) that: “A large swathe of Edinburgh and the Scottish Borders was plunged into darkness following a power outage on Sunday night. “SP Energy Networks said about 88,000 homes experienced the power cut just after 21:00. “Households in the capital were affected, as well as properties as far south […]

We are currently experiencing significant issues with the School’s OpenAFS file system. This contains our user’s DICE home directories along with the majority of the School’s group and research data. The majority of our administrative data is now held on the University’s DataStore service and so is unaffected. This issue is not restricted to Informatics […]

[Revised & updated, Tuesday 19th January 2021] The information in this blog post is relevant to anybody who manages or uses a self-managed server located in the Informatics Forum self-managed server room IF-B.Z14. It does not relate to equipment located in the smaller Forum self-managed server room IF-B.01 – so anybody who manages or uses […]

EdLAN is increasingly embracing site-local (“RFC1918“) addresses, and as a consequence we are beginning to see services being given such addresses. (A good argument could be made that the use of such addresses implies that they should never be accessible from elsewhere, but for at least some of these services it’s not obvious that that […]

Over the next few months all those with an existing SL7 DICE desktop will be contacted by the Computing Support Team to arrange for it to be upgraded to Ubuntu 20.04 (focal fossa) . We are aiming to upgrade all staff/PhD desktops by Easter 2021, but if you would like your machine upgraded sooner you […]

All Professional Services staff and a few other staff within Informatics have already successfully moved from staffmail to Office 365. With the retiral of the staffmail service, IS are now in a position to complete the move of all remaining staffmail accounts to office365. They will commence the process at the end of this month, […]

Users of AFS on MacOS may be mildly perturbed to find out that the MacOS AFS client has until recently contained a couple of critical bugs which could result in permanent loss of data if triggered. For this reason, we are advising all MacOS AFS users to update to the latest version of the AFS […]