Due to a sequence of unfortunate events, triggered by a failing power supply over the holiday period, it came to the attention of the computing staff on January 1st that external email addressed to @inf.ed.ac.uk email addresses was being rejected and returned to the sender. Though it was the holiday season, this was fixed at […]

The homepages web service – homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk – is overdue an Operating System upgrade. It is still running the SL5.6 OS, where as DICE desktops are running at least SL6.2. The plan is to upgrade the homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk service to SL6.2 on the morning of Sunday 7th October. The switch over will only cause a break in […]

To further track down possible use of cookies within Informatics, and to make sure we comply with the current legislation *, we’ve searched the homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk file space and the groups.inf.ed.ac.uk (and similar) file space for files containing the word “cookie” and “google-analytics.com/ga.js”. The latter being an example of something that generates “first party” cookies. Below […]

Below is a post from Information Services, warning about website hacking incidents that have happened recently within the University. If you are responsible for a website, or even just web pages, but particularily if you use a self run blog/wiki/WCMS, then it is a good idea to follow the advice given below and periodically Google […]

Following this mornings unplanned restart of one of the Forum SAN storage machines, various AFS volumes (where your files are stored) have been affected. We are bringing these back on-line a partition at a time. Unfortunately there is a delay as we check each partition for file system consistency, to make sure there’s been no […]

A bit belatedly we discovered that our two running Plone services were potentially vulnerable to an escalation of privileges exploit. Looking through the logs with the checker they provided, and the fact that we use Cosign authentication for most of our sites, seems to say that our sites have not been compromised in this way. […]

Due to a couple of incidents at the weekend, where two of our web servers were made inaccessible due to either accidental or malicious activity, we are now denying access from IP addresses attempting lots of simultaneous web connections. Once a single IP attempts an additional connection above a certain threshold, those subsequent connections will […]

As a security measure we are now blocking outbound ssh connections from the cvs and subversion server cvs/svn.inf.ed.ac.uk. There should be no need for users to be ssh’ing from cvs.inf and so no one should notice any change in behaviour. Those needing to ssh onward can use the hosts student.ssh.inf.ed.ac.uk or staff.ssh.inf.ed.ac.uk.