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 […]

Prior to lockdown we only had a single “staff” server and a single “student” server but with the need to provide adequate facilities to allow working from home, we had to expand our provision. Based on the work of FreeRDP and rdesktop, xrdp uses the remote desktop protocol to present a GUI to the user. […]

If you don’t use any servers in either of the Forum self-managed server rooms, then please ignore this blog post – and have a nice day! However, if you do use any such machines, then it is important that you read the following, and fully understand the situation concerning power to those machines. We are […]

As we prepare to enable IPv6 on the “static self-managed” wires, there are a few aspects to IPv6 addressing which you need to know. The most obvious difference between IPv4 and IPv6 addresses is that the latter are 128 bits log.  They’re conventionally divided up into eight 16-bit chunks, written in hex and separated by […]

Following the introduction of IPv6 for the Forum self-managed dynamic-address subnet (and the ironing out of a couple of teething problems), we would now like to roll IPv6 out to the two “static-self-managed” subnets (“SM164” and “SM197”). We propose enabling this on Monday 10th February, at lunch-time.  To do this we will set up the […]

It’s now more than three years since we implemented IPv6 for the School’s managed Linux (DICE) desktops and servers, and in that time we have seen very few issues which were specifically related to IPv6.  We were not, unfortunately, able to roll it out to the “self-managed” subnets at that time, for a few reasons, […]

We’ve been using OpenAFS as the School’s network file system (i.e. the thing that lets you access your DICE home directory and research group space on pretty much any machine from pretty much anywhere in the world) for the best part of 15 years. That’s a awfully long time in the fast moving world of […]

The new OpenVPN configuration files which we have been beta-testing for the last month or so have now gone live, and our computing.help pages have been updated. These configuration files are intended to have essentially the same effect as the previous ones.  The only difference is that some configuration statements have been updated in line […]

Several people have opened support tickets recently asking about warning messages being produced by OpenVPN when connecting to Informatics.  The reason for these warnings has been that the configuration syntax has gradually changed over time to accommodate new features, and the form we have in our configuration files is now deprecated and will be removed […]

Earlier this year, we mentioned that we intended to replace the Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) system which supplies power to all of the server rooms located in the Informatics Forum – see our blog post Forum server room UPS from January 24, 2019. Since then, we’ve been doing lots of preparation, and we are now […]