As announced on sys-announce we will shortly be migrating all the existing Informatics cloud printers to the EdPrint system. The blurb from Information Services: What’s happening and when? Information Services is launching EdPrint over the next few months, a major update to the print, copy and scan service used in the University. The cloud print […]

Apple are expected to announce the availability of MacOS 11, Big Sur, shortly. Unfortunately this sees a change to kernel module loading that will stop the existing AuriStor AFS kernel modules loading and so AuriStor client version 0.198 (and earlier)  will no longer work. If you require AFS your your Mac, we don’t recommend upgrading […]

As the likes of homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk and groups.inf.ed.ac.uk are shared user services, anyone using some sort of authentication/authorisation to restrict access, has to trust the other users of those web services. A lot of the web’s security model relies on the “same origin policy”. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Same-origin_policy which limits the access scripts have to data (particularly authentication […]

For security reasons we are reviewing our use of user authored CGI scripts that are currently running on our web services. Those CGIs that run as the author, such as those on homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk and sweb.inf.ed.ac.uk, are not under review at the moment, but other CGIs that run as the web server daemon are. The main […]

As previously advised, the new Forum server room UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply) will be connected to the server rooms on Saturday the 20th of July. This will necessitate the powering down of all machines in the Forum server rooms, and therefore the loss of the Informatics services provided by those machines. It is probably safest […]

With the introduction of the University’s centrally provided blogging service (blogs.ed.ac.uk), no new blogs will be created on the Informatics blog.inf.ed.ac.uk and wp.inf.ed.ac.uk services. The central service is based on a current version of WordPress, and has a selection of modern themes, and plugins, including an EdGEL one to match the University’s branding. Using the […]

The web server that hosts the groups.inf.ed.ac.uk web site (and various others) is one of the last to be upgraded to SL7. I had hoped to squeeze it in before the end of the year, but it will now happen on Friday January 12th 2018. The groups.inf web server actually hosts multiple sites, the main […]

There has been a recent spate of spammers forging list member or list admin emails, and thus are able to post directly to the corresponding targeted list (as typically list members are always allowed to post to the list they are members of). All external email passing through the University’s mail servers are given a […]

There have been a couple of changes to the local mail services recently. None of which Informatics users should have noticed, but for the record …

The x509 certificate used to secure communications with smtp.inf.ed.ac.uk changed this morning. The authenticated SMTP service uses an automatically generated certificated, ultimately signed by the University’s root CA. The service certificates only last a year, and this morning it was automatically replaced with a new certificate. Certificate: Data: Version: 3 (0x2) Serial Number: 3811 (0xee3) […]