The hardware that hosts the homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk web service is rather old in the tooth. A new machine is ready to take over, and I plan to do this on Tuesday 6th of March at 10am. There should only be a brief break in service of less than a minute, but the service should be considered […]

The University is increasingly concerned about the security of our computing services, and as such is moving vulnerable services behind the University firewall or simply shutting them down altogether. With the closure of staffmail and everyone now using Office 365, our authenticated smtp.inf.ed.ac.uk service is a service with relatively little use, is world accessible, and […]

When the School of Informatics was first formed, existing individual department services were kept running. One of those services was ftp.cogsci.ed.ac.uk. However over the years its functionality became less and less, and currently only allows public downloads of content that has not been updated in 10 years. Looking at the logs the vast majority of […]

To improve the security of our HTTPS web sites, we have removed support for older/less secure cipher suites, particularly those susceptible to the SWEET32 attack. This should not impact any current web browsers, but old devices, eg old android mobile phones may find they can no longer connect to our HTTP websites. Neil

To make it harder for spammers and scammers to forge email claiming to originate from the ed.ac.uk domain, the University will shortly be changing the DMARC sub-domain policy (sp argument) to “reject”. This change will tell any mail services that use DMARC and SPF  tests when validating email, that any email that fails the SPF […]

Access to the ifile.inf.ed.ac.uk service has been restricted to the University (and therefor also the Informatics) networks. Previously you could directly access ifile.inf.ed.ac.uk from anywhere, but now if you are at home, for example, you will first need to connect to the University or Informatics VPN service to make your device look like it is […]

Back in November 2020 we announced a change to the cloud printing service at Informatics. Unsurprisingly this was probably of little interest to most people as they worked from home during lockdown. Now that people are returning to the Informatics buildings, this is a quick reminder of what happened. We are still using the University’s […]

DMARC is a technology designed to combat forged email coming from senders other than those who are entitled to send as a particular domain. Unfortunately there are times where you may want to legitimately “forge” the sender address of an email. eg on mailing lists. Typically if a poster sends a message to a list […]

To improve the resilience of the services hosted in the JCMB server room, a new Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) is being installed to cover the whole room. Unfortunately this work needs the power to be switched off for a period of time. That will mean shutting down servers and services. The thing that will affect […]

For a few years now, modern browsers like Chrome, Firefox and Edge have been warning as “insecure”, web sites that are served as plain text over HTTP (port 80). Google blog article – https://blog.google/products/chrome/milestone-chrome-security-marking-http-not-secure/ Informatics are working through making all our managed websites available over encrypted HTTPS (port 443). If you run your own website […]