The computing team has been reviewing the services it provides to the School in order to identify and withdraw support for those services which are no longer seeing significant usage, can be replicated by a centrally provided service, or present a significant maintenance challenge. Originally introduced in 2007, iFriend has provided a means for users […]

As a measure to increase the overall security of our systems, we will shortly be introducing a policy where DICE accounts are suspended if they are inactive for 180 days. Please see here for details: http://computing.help.inf.ed.ac.uk/account-inactivity-suspension If you have any questions concerning this, please contact support in the usual way.

Users of DICE machines may have noticed that system utilities such as getent and finger are no longer returning a full list of Informatics users. We use sssd (System Security Service Daemon) on DICE to cache LDAP data, such as user and group information. For finger to work with anything other than usernames, it requires […]

We have introduced a new password policy for DICE accounts: http://computing.help.inf.ed.ac.uk/password-policy The significant changes made to the previous policy are: We now have a more flexible approach to the number of character classes required in any password – specifically that the longer the password, the fewer number of distinct character classes is required. All password […]

We have recently implemented automated processing of the final stages of a user account’s lifecycle within our account management system, ‘Prometheus’. [1] This is used to apply expiry (or ‘grace’) and suspension periods to an account, as described in our account closure policy. [2] All user accounts have ‘roles’ and ‘entitlements’. These are used by […]

This article describes Prometheus, the account management system developed within Informatics (note that the choice of name comes from this Prometheus, and predates the recent film). More accurately, Prometheus could be described as an entity management system, as it manages machine details (and other things), as well as people. This article will only discuss the […]