If WordPress spam concerns you, there are some plugins and extras that you might find useful, namely: Akismet, Anti-Spam, reCaptcha, and Comment-Control. These are available on blog.inf, but will need to be activated from your blog dashboard. Akismet …is a hosted web service that automatically detects comment and trackback spam. It’s free for personal use, […]

It’s now very nearly five years since we moved into the Forum (time flies…), and in common with all our other computing equipment we now need to refresh the building’s network switches.  Rather than do the whole lot in one go, which would have had unfortunate effects on the remainder of the School’s equipment budget, […]

In order to make the process of searching for particular software packages slightly easier, there is now a web page available at: http://pkgsearch.inf.ed.ac.uk …which will allow you to search our local repositories using a single keyword or RPM string, with the option of tailoring the search to a specific software group, for 32- & 64-bit […]

A number of users of our self-managed “DHCP” subnet experienced problems accessing the network starting some time on Saturday 20th up until 14:45 on Monday 22nd.  We believe that this was caused by a rogue DHCP server, and that disabling its network access restored the service for everyone else. Please be careful when adding devices […]

You can now find a summary of the responses to the Student Survey carried out last year. We found the responses very helpful in planning and prioritising some changes which include: 1. Improved documentation Our new documentation was announced recently – see http://computing.help.inf.ed.ac.uk 2. Improving awareness of services e.g. afs, openvpn, vnc, student.compute 3. Looking […]

One of the outcomes from the 2012 student survey was a decision to increase the AFS home directory quotas for all users. The new limits agreed were: UG1/UG2 – 2GB UG3/UG4/PGT – 5GB Staff/PGR – 10GB Unfortunately, our policy of not overloading student partitions (that is not allocating more space for users use than the […]

The following dates have been set for IS Network Services to perform essential replacement work on the core EdLAN network routers: Appleton Tower – Saturday 19th January 2013 08:00-10:00 (then at risk 10:00-12:00) The Appleton Tower work will cause an outage for our bridged network services in both the Forum and AT.  In particular, VoIP […]

Wireless networking spectrum is a scarce resource.  In the 2.4GHz band (“802.11b/g”) there are essentially only three non-overlapping channels available.  Things are not quite as tight in the 5GHz band (“802.11a”), but there is by no means generous provision there either.  To make matters worse, these are not dedicated WiFi bands,  but are shared with […]

Some users have been noting errors “Another device on the network is using your computer’s IP address” and our network monitoring has detected a number of flip-flops involving Apple kit trying to use the same IP address. The culprit seems to be Apple’s ‘Internet Sharing’ software which causes a machine to use addresses which have […]

The blogs currently available on blog.inf – which has been not-a-service since its inception in 2009 – have moved to a new host, running the latest version of WordPress. This is now a supported service. The upgrade and transfer process has obviously preserved all blog posts, comments, and uploaded files. However, there are probably a […]