The Forum server rooms are covered by a pair of Uninterruptible Power Supplies (UPSes), one of which has developed a fault in its interface to the outside world.  As a result we can neither query its status, nor expect it to signal machines to shut down when the power goes off. UPS Repair Man came […]

Cloud based printing is becoming more and more widespread across the University. Instead of needing to remember the queue name of the nearest printer, jobs are sent to a single cloud queue (to be strictly accurate, there are in fact two queues, one for mono jobs and one for colour) and can then be collected […]

The new lecture recording facility, MediaHopper Replay, is now live (as of 5th September) and by the start of teaching, the service will be available in 114 teaching spaces. Further details can be found on the IS page which includes a link to help and support web pages. There are still training sessions available and […]

Good news! We are extending the Forum self-managed server room facility by adding three brand new racks in a nearby room. Bad news! To arrange the necessary power feeds to the new room, we will need to completely switch off the power to the existing self-managed server room for a short period next week. The […]

Informatics has been selected to host one of the first five sponsored RIPE atlas anchors!  The other four sites are in Macedonia, France, Romania and Albania. The RIPE atlas system consists of several thousand network “probes” dotted around the world.  These perform a variety of standard and user-instigated measurements of hosts and services on the […]

Over the last couple of years, we have noticed that more and more of you are buying NAS appliances, boxes containing a number of commodity disks which can be attached to the network and serve that disk space to other machines on the network. This was a cause of concern to the computing staff because […]

Please take care when you type internet domain names, whether into an address box or at the command line! Domain-squatters are people who register internet domain names which are very similar to other “real” names.  They do this in the hope of attracting mis-directed traffic, generally either for advertising purposes or so that they can […]

The university information security office recommends keeping system software up to date as the first basic requirement to protect yourself online. Users of self-managed machines, particularly laptops and tablets that are used outside the School need to be particularly vigilant. Computing support rarely recommend installing the initial release of new software straight away, e.g. 10.12.0, […]

We are planning to upgrade the WordPress server providing blog.inf from SL6 to SL7, and to this end a clone of blog.inf running on SL7 has been set up. If you wish to test that your blog and any associated plugins behave as you expect under SL7, then take a look at the SL7 test […]

Following on from the recent reminder of disruption to Informatics and central University systems on Tuesday 10th January, here is a bit more detail. A fault was recently identified in the Appleton Tower “essential services” electrical supply, which amongst other things powers the basement server room which houses many Informatics and central University systems. Unfortunately […]