Our blog service, blog.inf.ed.ac.uk, is overdue an update. It is currently running 4.2.7 of WordPress, the current version is 4.5.2. The plan is to update blog.inf.ed.ac.uk to 4.5.2 (Coleman release) next Thursday 19th May at 9am. We’re not expecting any problems, but you can try out a test update of a clone of blog.inf taken […]

We have several terabytes of new disk space to attach to our SAN. Unfortunately this will mean shutting down the disk array ifevo3 to do the work. The data on ifevo3 is nearly all group space, plus some of our system/backup data. While ifevo3 is down, the group space listed below will be unavailable. To […]

We’ve recently been getting an increased number of support tickets about problems accessing Student Services pages. The common thread in most of these tickets is that the person involved is incorrectly trying to do so using an HTTPS URL. In the case of the Student Services pages, HTTPS is used to authenticate you, and then […]

The disk array ifevo3 has a fault with its flash memory. Though it may be just about possible to replace the faulty memory without disrupting the file service, the recommendation is to shut down the the disk array to do the work. So this is what we plan on doing. The data on ifevo3 is […]

As happened today, “Yesterday” isn’t always yesterday! A brief explanation. All AFS home directories (and some group areas) contain a Yesterday sub-directory. This directory contains a copy of your home directory from “Yesterday”, which can be useful if you accidentally delete a file. The Yesterday directory is actually a by-product of our backup system. “Yesterday” […]

AFS file space at risk this coming weekend.

A few weeks ago we rolled out some new sensible default apache configuration to all our web servers. These configuration changes will affect all DICE web servers unless their manager has chosen to exclude or modify some of these settings. This includes the few web services where the servers are managed DICE machines, but authorized […]

In line with current best practice we will shortly be removing the RC4 stream cipher from our Apache HTTPS sites. Indeed we’ve already removed it from https://wiki.inf.ed.ac.uk without any apparent issues. For more details see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RC4 Modern browsers will connect via one of the various other SSL ciphers that we support. However, please do let […]

Yesterday evening, our SAN storage device satabeast2, suffered 2 disk failures. We can cope with 1 disk failure (RAID5), but following that first disk failure there is a period of time, while the redundancy is restored, that should a second disk fail then data will be lost. This is what happened yesterday. There is a […]

We’ve recently made a small local change to mailman that allows users with the appropriate entitlement, automatic access to a list admin web page. Similarily, entitlements can now also be used to limit the visibility of the mailing list archives. Entitlements are attributed to groups of users (or individuals), typically according to their status in […]