The Informatics mailing list service has been running for many years (decades). The move to Ubuntu has highlighted its age, and it is a bit of an oddity in terms of services that Informatics run (we shouldn’t be duplicating services that are provided centrally by the University). With this in mind we have started the […]

The homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk web service is due to update dated from SL7 to Ubuntu Jammy (the same a normal DICE desktops and servers). This provides version changes for many packages, the most notable being Python and PHP OSSL7Ubuntu JammyPython2.73.10PHP7.38.1 Any existing code you have that uses these packages is likely to need checked and fixed if […]

The sweb.inf.ed.ac.uk service is due to update dated from SL7 to Ubuntu Jammy. This provides version changes for many packages, the most notable being Python and PHP OSSL7Ubuntu JammyPython2.73.10PHP5.48.1 Any existing code you have that uses these are likely to need checked and fixed if they are to remain working. A temporary version of sweb.inf.ed.ac.uk, […]

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 […]

The computing team has been reviewing the services it provides to the School in order to identify and withdraw support for those services which are no longer seeing significant usage, can be replicated by a centrally provided service, or present a significant maintenance challenge. Originally introduced in 2007, iFriend has provided a means for users […]

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 […]

There has been a unpublished local feature of the mailman lists service running on https://lists.inf.ed.ac.uk which has changed.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 […]