Earlier this year, we mentioned that we intended to replace the Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) system which supplies power to all of the server rooms located in the Informatics Forum – see our blog post Forum server room UPS from January 24, 2019. Since then, we’ve been doing lots of preparation, and we are now […]

With the introduction of the University’s centrally provided blogging service (blogs.ed.ac.uk), no new blogs will be created on the Informatics blog.inf.ed.ac.uk and wp.inf.ed.ac.uk services. The central service is based on a current version of WordPress, and has a selection of modern themes, and plugins, including an EdGEL one to match the University’s branding. Using the […]

We are about to upgrade all rack power bars in the Informatics Forum self-managed server room IF-B.Z14. We will be replacing the existing metered power bars (APC models AP7853 and AP8853) with switched versions (APC model AP8953). The new power bars will allow us fine-grained control of individual power outlets; they’ll also help us prevent […]

Last weekend (Saturday 19.1.19), the UPS system which supplies power to the various server rooms located in the Informatics Forum developed a fault which meant that one half of the pair of units which comprise the UPS went off-line. As a result, the other half of the pair became overloaded: we now have so many […]

Good news! We are extending the Forum self-managed server room facility by adding three brand new racks in a nearby room. Bad news! To arrange the necessary power feeds to the new room, we will need to completely switch off the power to the existing self-managed server room for a short period next week. The […]

Our blog service, blog.inf.ed.ac.uk, is overdue an update. It is currently running 4.2.7 of WordPress, the current version is 4.5.2. The plan is to update blog.inf.ed.ac.uk to 4.5.2 (Coleman release) next Thursday 19th May at 9am. We’re not expecting any problems, but you can try out a test update of a clone of blog.inf taken […]

I’ve posted some information about the future of alpine on DICE on my blog. But don’t worry, it’s good news.

We have several terabytes of new disk space to attach to our SAN. Unfortunately this will mean shutting down the disk array ifevo3 to do the work. The data on ifevo3 is nearly all group space, plus some of our system/backup data. While ifevo3 is down, the group space listed below will be unavailable. To […]

A few weeks ago we rolled out some new sensible default apache configuration to all our web servers. These configuration changes will affect all DICE web servers unless their manager has chosen to exclude or modify some of these settings. This includes the few web services where the servers are managed DICE machines, but authorized […]

In line with current best practice we will shortly be removing the RC4 stream cipher from our Apache HTTPS sites. Indeed we’ve already removed it from https://wiki.inf.ed.ac.uk without any apparent issues. For more details see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RC4 Modern browsers will connect via one of the various other SSL ciphers that we support. However, please do let […]