The 4th minor update to ScientificLinux 6 (which is based on RHEL6) is now ready for deployment to the Informatics SL6 DICE office and student lab machines. A minor update like this provides us with the opportunity to update important software and fix any bugs which are not security issues (we apply security updates as […]

In order to maintain the integrity of our systems we need to reboot all DICE desktops over the next few days. We understand that reboots can be very inconvenient so you can be assured that we will only ever schedule reboots which we consider to be essential. A delayed reboot has been scheduled for all […]

It’s now easier to see whether or not your account has been compromised. As part of our ongoing work to enhance the security of the computing infrastructure within the School of Informatics we have developed a new web interface which allows users to review their recent login activity. The site is accessible at: https://cabin.inf.ed.ac.uk/authview/ This […]

On Tuesday 16th April we plan to replace the SSH server named “dunlin” which hosts student.ssh.inf.ed.ac.uk and ssh.inf.ed.ac.uk with a machine named “kubelik”. All that will happen is that at about 09:00 on Tuesday we will change the DNS aliases to point to the new machine. This change can take some time to propagate so […]

The 3rd minor update to ScientificLinux 6 (which is based on RHEL6) is now ready for deployment to the Informatics SL6 DICE office machines. A minor update like this provides us with the opportunity to update important software and fix any bugs which are not security issues (we apply security updates as soon as they […]

In order to improve the security of the DICE computing infrastructure we have decided to disable support for the SSH version 1 protocol. This is a very old protocol which is now considered to be obsolete. Due to a number of design flaws it is known to be insecure and is vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks. […]

As many users will have noticed, the Informatics SSH server ‘dunlin’ was unavailable from the morning of Thursday 26th July until the afternoon of Tuesday 31st July. This was because the root account on the system was compromised and an attempt was made to insert a rootkit into the kernel. The configuration of this system […]

The 2nd minor update to ScientificLinux 6 (which is based on RHEL6) is now ready for deployment to the Informatics SL6 DICE office machines. A minor update like this provides us with the opportunity to update important software and fix any bugs which are not security issues (we apply security updates as soon as they […]

Major updates have been provided for the firefox web browser and the thunderbird mail client on ScientificLinux 6 which will take us up to version 10 (Extended Support Release). These updates provide a large number of fixes for serious security holes as well as many feature enhancements. We have tested these updates and do not […]

In early October 2011 we discovered that the School of Informatics SSH service had been seriously compromised. Since that time our Computing Team has been working very hard to thoroughly investigate the circumstances of the event and provide a robust response. As part of the response to this event we have written a detailled report. […]