IPv6 was standardised around 15 years ago, primarily as a way to address the anticipated exhaustion of IPv4 address space, and since then we have had a steady trickle of people asking whether they could have one to use on the University’s network.  Until now we have had to turn these down, unfortunately, as our […]

Magnetic tape is viewed as a somewhat outdated medium by many people these days but for backing up larges amounts of data over a long period of time (and Informatics has a lot of data to back up), it still offers by far the best value for money. Our old Overland Neo8000 has served us […]

The decant from Appleton Tower to Forrest Hill and the Wilkie Building is now well underway. The first move to Forrest Hill took place over the weekend 23rd/24th May. The Graduate School were mostly all up and running again before lunchtime on Monday 25th May. We spent most of the rest of the week installing […]

As we prepare to decant from Appleton Tower to Forrest Hill and Wilkie Building, I thought it might be useful to describe how we’re networking the buildings and why we’ve done it the way we have. In short, both FH and Wilkie will be operated as virtual floors of Appleton Tower.  This makes it straightforward […]

Last year I wrote about a couple of network security projects which were in their early stages of development.  As the last of these has recently completed, I thought it might be useful to summarise their outcomes. We have had edge filtering in place for a long time, since we ran Solaris on Suns in […]

As described in my November posting, we’re making some changes to our OpenVPN configuration, partly to support new devices, partly to add capacity, and partly because one of the features we currently use is being phased out. The server-end changes are now all in place, as are the new configuration files needed on the client […]

When the Forum meeting rooms were set up, we configured the wired network in them to use the “office self-managed DHCP” subnet.  This seemed appropriate at the time, as most users were expected to be Forum occupants.  The ground-floor meeting areas, in contrast, were set up to use a separate “conferences” subnet, outside the Informatics […]

It’s now over ten years since we first set up our OpenVPN service, and things have moved on quite a bit since then.  So far we have managed to maintain compatibility for existing users of the service, but we would now like to make a couple of enhancements which unfortunately do require incompatible changes: We […]

You can now follow us on twitter at @infalerts! We will post details of planned and unplanned outages, information on new services, changes to existing services and anything else that we think may be helpful to you as users of the IT services provided by Informatics. Information Services (IS) also post information about services they […]

Following the changes noted in my recent article, the Forum network appears to have been stable again.  If you’re still experiencing problems, please report them through the support form in the usual way and we’ll look into them. As a separate issue, a number of central University services were affected by a firewall problem on […]