Over the festive break, we will be running a “salvage” across all ourAFS file servers. This salvage is like an “fsck” (for those familiarwith that) that checks the consistency of the filesystem. It is estimated the salvaging will take 30 minutes to run per server,but it does depend on the volume of data on the […]

List of various services affected by the Appleton Tower power down on 13 of January 2024

In preparation to replace the existing www.ed.ac.uk/informatics/ pages with new web pages hosted at (www.)informatics.ed.ac.uk, the DNS entries informatics.ed.ac.uk and www.informatics.ed.ac.uk have changed to point at the IS (Information Services) web hosting service, rather than our own server. It was accepted that this may break any old existing www.informatics.ed.ac.uk URLs (which has been deprecated for […]

blog.inf content being cloned

On Tuesday 12th of December 2023 Informations Services (IS) enabled the “SafeLink” feature of the Office 365* mail service. This doesn’t seem to have been very well announced, and came as a surprise even to the Informatics computing staff. The basics are now that when a mail is delivered into your Office 365 mailbox, any […]

There has been a unpublished local feature of the mailman lists service running on https://lists.inf.ed.ac.uk which has changed. The short version is that if you used to deliberately use the URL https://lists.inf.ed.ac.uk/mailman/… to log you into list, you should now use https://auth.lists.inf.ed.ac.uk/mailman/… Now a bit more detail and history. The original web interface to the […]

Back in January 2022 the University intended to set a default DMARC policy for all sub-domains to be “sp=reject”. As inf.ed.ac.uk is a sub-domain that would have affected us, and so we set it to “none” while we considered the implications. Though the University has still not made its change, we are now going to […]

The ifile service has had a good run, but it’s based on old software that uses an unsupported framework. Analysis shows that it’s rarely used, so to free up resources we’ve decided to retire it. We’ve contacted the users that use the service the most to warn of the impending closure. We plan to shut […]

The hardware that hosts the homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk web service is rather old in the tooth. A new machine is ready to take over, and I plan to do this on Tuesday 6th of March at 10am. There should only be a brief break in service of less than a minute, but the service should be considered […]

The University is increasingly concerned about the security of our computing services, and as such is moving vulnerable services behind the University firewall or simply shutting them down altogether. With the closure of staffmail and everyone now using Office 365, our authenticated smtp.inf.ed.ac.uk service is a service with relatively little use, is world accessible, and […]