Over the festive break, we will be running a “salvage” across all ourAFS file servers. This salvage is like an “fsck” (for those familiarwith that) that checks the consistency of the filesystem. It is estimated the salvaging will take 30 minutes to run per server,but it does depend on the volume of data on 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 […]

List of various services affected by the Appleton Tower power down on 13 of January 2024

You may soon lose access to your University email if you use an old or unmaintained email client. Even if you don’t, you may need to make changes. Microsoft has announced that to improve security, it is changing the way email clients can authenticate to the University email server. This may result in some older […]

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 […]

As previously advised, the new Forum server room UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply) will be connected to the server rooms on Saturday the 20th of July. This will necessitate the powering down of all machines in the Forum server rooms, and therefore the loss of the Informatics services provided by those machines. It is probably safest […]

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 […]

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 […]

As happened today, “Yesterday” isn’t always yesterday! A brief explanation. All AFS home directories (and some group areas) contain a Yesterday sub-directory. This directory contains a copy of your home directory from “Yesterday”, which can be useful if you accidentally delete a file. The Yesterday directory is actually a by-product of our backup system. “Yesterday” […]