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 […]

As a result of a 2009 EU directive, the Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) Regulations 2003 (“PECR”) have been amended such that visitors to web sites must now give their prior consent to the placing of cookies.  The way in which this is to be done is not specified by the regulations; the ICO’s […]

This is an early warning that we shall be upgrading DICE desktops to Scientific Linux 6 (SL6) this summer/autumn. SL6, which is based on Redhat’s Enterprise Linux 6, is very similar to Fedora 13 on which our current DICE desktop platform is based. However, support for Fedora 13 is about to be withdrawn – Fedora […]