The School has been allocated £2M funding from the University to increase the cooling and power capacity of the Forum server room. This should allow us to add around 60 additional GPU servers. Completion of the project is expected early Q2 2025 and is starting this month (November). The project will build a large chiller […]

As of today, 29/03/2024, the blog service is now running on Ubuntu Jammy and has been updated to the latest version of WordPress (6.4). The biggest difference is the editor used for pages and posts, but the previous editor can be enabled via the “Classic Editor” plugin. If you notice any blog posts have disappeared […]

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 […]

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 […]

For a few years now, modern browsers like Chrome, Firefox and Edge have been warning as “insecure”, web sites that are served as plain text over HTTP (port 80). Google blog article – https://blog.google/products/chrome/milestone-chrome-security-marking-http-not-secure/ Informatics are working through making all our managed websites available over encrypted HTTPS (port 443). If you run your own website […]

The BBC news website tells us (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-fife-55979665) that: “A large swathe of Edinburgh and the Scottish Borders was plunged into darkness following a power outage on Sunday night. “SP Energy Networks said about 88,000 homes experienced the power cut just after 21:00. “Households in the capital were affected, as well as properties as far south […]

As announced on sys-announce we will shortly be migrating all the existing Informatics cloud printers to the EdPrint system. The blurb from Information Services: What’s happening and when? Information Services is launching EdPrint over the next few months, a major update to the print, copy and scan service used in the University. The cloud print […]

Apple are expected to announce the availability of MacOS 11, Big Sur, shortly. Unfortunately this sees a change to kernel module loading that will stop the existing AuriStor AFS kernel modules loading and so AuriStor client version 0.198 (and earlier)  will no longer work. If you require AFS your your Mac, we don’t recommend upgrading […]

For security reasons we are reviewing our use of user authored CGI scripts that are currently running on our web services. Those CGIs that run as the author, such as those on homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk and sweb.inf.ed.ac.uk, are not under review at the moment, but other CGIs that run as the web server daemon are. The main […]