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 […]

Earlier this year we conducted a survey of VM/cloud usage. The project has now concluded and a formal report on the project can be found on the Rat Unit wiki This includes a link to the survey report itself. Copies of all the documentation relating to the project can be found in afs in the […]

We’ve recently made a small local change to mailman that allows users with the appropriate entitlement, automatic access to a list admin web page. Similarily, entitlements can now also be used to limit the visibility of the mailing list archives. Entitlements are attributed to groups of users (or individuals), typically according to their status in […]

We’re delighted to announce Virtual DICE. It’s like a DICE desktop, but running in a virtual machine. It’s currently in a testing phase – see below. Everybody in the School of Informatics is welcome to use Virtual DICE, but you will need your own computer, which will need (at the last count) 35GB of free […]

Virtually all of Informatics storage is via our redundant Storage Array Network (SAN). All our arrays are configured as either level 1, 5 or 10 RAID. Meaning that if one of the physical hard disks fails, the data on the RAID array remains intact, allowing us to replace the failed disk without any interruption to […]

Due to a sequence of unfortunate events, triggered by a failing power supply over the holiday period, it came to the attention of the computing staff on January 1st that external email addressed to @inf.ed.ac.uk email addresses was being rejected and returned to the sender. Though it was the holiday season, this was fixed at […]

The homepages web service – homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk – is overdue an Operating System upgrade. It is still running the SL5.6 OS, where as DICE desktops are running at least SL6.2. The plan is to upgrade the homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk service to SL6.2 on the morning of Sunday 7th October. The switch over will only cause a break in […]

To further track down possible use of cookies within Informatics, and to make sure we comply with the current legislation *, we’ve searched the homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk file space and the groups.inf.ed.ac.uk (and similar) file space for files containing the word “cookie” and “google-analytics.com/ga.js”. The latter being an example of something that generates “first party” cookies. Below […]

In a previous post we mentioned that noise levels in the self-managed server room (i.e. B.Z14) of the Informatics Forum were higher than we might like. And users of that room can’t have failed to notice that it’s also been much hotter and stuffier than anyone might like … We’re pleased to say that alterations have […]