Following the unplanned power cut on Tuesday, one of our SAN machines (ifevo4) started reporting a problem with the flash cache memory in one of its controllers. The machine has two controllers, A and B, for redundancy. Both with two fibre channel (FC) connections, one to each of our fabrics (network). This means that should […]

On Tuesday 4th of March there was a period of a few minutes, from 11:15am to about 11:25am, when most peoples’ home directory quota was incorrectly shrunk to 2MB. Anything trying to write to home directories during that time will have failed. This happened because the script, to calculate peoples’ quota, had not been updated […]

We have received a replacement for the SAN controller that failed following the power cut of the 11th of November. We had to abort our plan to replace it yesterday (Monday 18th) after we discovered there’s not enough slack in the cables to manoeuvre the failed controller out and the replacement controller in. Unfortunately this […]

As people using the University’s EASE web login page will have hopefully noticed, the look of https://www.ease.ed.ac.uk will be changing at 8am on the 5th of November. The image below shows you what to expect, there may be small differences, but generally it will look like the following: So rest assured this change is legitimate […]

As announced on sys-announce, to address security flaw in WordPress 3.6 and earlier, blog.inf.ed.ac.uk has been updated to the current version of WordPress (3.6.1). There will be some small changes, and you many notice pop-ups highlighting new options. If you run your own WordPress installation within Informatics, then you must upgrade your version too, as […]

We have some new SAN storage to bring on-line. It will be replacing the “head” of an existing SAN storage box, which will mean bringing it out of service while we replace the old head. We plan to do this at 9am on Sunday 1st of September 2013. This will mean that all data on […]

In the late afternoon of Wednesday 19th of June, around 4:50pm, there was an unexpected glitch on the Informatics SAN (Storage Area Network). This caused some of our AFS storage to go offline for several hours. What follows is a recap of the event, and what we did to recover from it. Background First a […]

The Informatics blog service has been running an older version of the WordPress software for a while. At 1pm on Thursday 20th of June we plan to upgrade this to the current version (3.5.1). Our testing hasn’t shown any problems, and you can try out the new version at the temporary URL http://wobleg.inf.ed.ac.uk/ (this is […]

Virtually all of Informatics storage is via our redundant Storage Array Network (SAN). All our arrays are configured as either level 1, 5 or 10 RAID. Meaning that if one of the physical hard disks fails, the data on the RAID array remains intact, allowing us to replace the failed disk without any interruption to […]

The web server that hosts the groups/conferences/workshops/events.inf.ed.ac.uk web sites, and various other research sites, is long overdue an upgrade. Currently it is still running the SL5 OS, whereas virtually all other DICE computers are SL6.3. If things go to plan, the switchover date will be Thursday 24th of January at 1pm. During which time all […]