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 […]

When the School of Informatics was first formed, existing individual department services were kept running. One of those services was ftp.cogsci.ed.ac.uk. However over the years its functionality became less and less, and currently only allows public downloads of content that has not been updated in 10 years. Looking at the logs the vast majority of […]

To improve the security of our HTTPS web sites, we have removed support for older/less secure cipher suites, particularly those susceptible to the SWEET32 attack. This should not impact any current web browsers, but old devices, eg old android mobile phones may find they can no longer connect to our HTTP websites. Neil

To make it harder for spammers and scammers to forge email claiming to originate from the ed.ac.uk domain, the University will shortly be changing the DMARC sub-domain policy (sp argument) to “reject”. This change will tell any mail services that use DMARC and SPF  tests when validating email, that any email that fails the SPF […]

Access to the ifile.inf.ed.ac.uk service has been restricted to the University (and therefor also the Informatics) networks. Previously you could directly access ifile.inf.ed.ac.uk from anywhere, but now if you are at home, for example, you will first need to connect to the University or Informatics VPN service to make your device look like it is […]

Back in November 2020 we announced a change to the cloud printing service at Informatics. Unsurprisingly this was probably of little interest to most people as they worked from home during lockdown. Now that people are returning to the Informatics buildings, this is a quick reminder of what happened. We are still using the University’s […]

During the recent lockdowns, new working practices have developed which place far less reliance on the printing out of materials. Recognising this, and wishing to reduce the financial and environmental impact of printing across its estate, the University has adopted a policy on sustainable printing, the implementation of which will see printers with low levels […]

DMARC is a technology designed to combat forged email coming from senders other than those who are entitled to send as a particular domain. Unfortunately there are times where you may want to legitimately “forge” the sender address of an email. eg on mailing lists. Typically if a poster sends a message to a list […]

To improve the resilience of the services hosted in the JCMB server room, a new Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) is being installed to cover the whole room. Unfortunately this work needs the power to be switched off for a period of time. That will mean shutting down servers and services. The thing that will affect […]

[Revised & updated, Tuesday 19th January 2021] The information in this blog post is relevant to anybody who manages or uses a self-managed server located in the Informatics Forum self-managed server room IF-B.Z14. It does not relate to equipment located in the smaller Forum self-managed server room IF-B.01 – so anybody who manages or uses […]