As posted to our announcements mailing list, we’ll be upgrading both of our commodity PostgreSQL servers “pgteach” and “pgresearch” this week (Wednesday 16th Sep, for the avoidance of doubt!) to the latest major version, 9.4. The process is usually fairly painless as it can be performed “online” with only a few minutes of downtime, and […]

One of the consequences of the move from SL6 to SL7 is that we have switched from using the AMD automounter (which isn’t available on SL7) to Autofs. In making this switch, we have taken the opportunity to clear out many old and broken automounts, particularly within /group. We have also removed the /legacy automount […]

Currently the Forum print rooms located in the North East corner of the building have both a Xerox Multi-function device capable of printing in colour and a small monochrome printer. These mono printers are very old now and becoming more and more expensive to keep in service. Usage figures don’t justify their replacement and so […]

For many years we’ve supported multiple versions of MATLAB across our managed DICE environment. We’ll continue to support requests for alternative versions (whenever possible), but our upcoming move to DICE SL7 has provided a sensible moment to simplify the default MATLAB versions on our desktops and servers. So last night our users mostly received the […]

IPv6 was standardised around 15 years ago, primarily as a way to address the anticipated exhaustion of IPv4 address space, and since then we have had a steady trickle of people asking whether they could have one to use on the University’s network.  Until now we have had to turn these down, unfortunately, as our […]

Edit: this work has now been done. To enable hardware maintenance a number of services and websites will be unavailable for a short while – read on for details. The following services and sites will be unavailable between about 10am and 11am on Tuesday 1 September, after which they’ll reappear: energy-hub.inf.ed.ac.uk Commercialisation web sites including […]

Magnetic tape is viewed as a somewhat outdated medium by many people these days but for backing up larges amounts of data over a long period of time (and Informatics has a lot of data to back up), it still offers by far the best value for money. Our old Overland Neo8000 has served us […]

Porting DICE to a new version of the Redhat platform is a non trivial task. For a flavour of the work involved, you can read the final report for the base platform upgrade project. Note that this doesn’t include the additional work in updating all the teaching and software packages that we add to Redhat.

The 6th minor update to ScientificLinux 6 (which is based on RHEL6) is now ready for deployment to the Informatics SL6 DICE office and student lab machines. A minor update like this provides us with the opportunity to update important software and fix any bugs which are not security issues (we apply security updates as […]

We’ve recently been getting an increased number of support tickets about problems accessing Student Services pages. The common thread in most of these tickets is that the person involved is incorrectly trying to do so using an HTTPS URL. In the case of the Student Services pages, HTTPS is used to authenticate you, and then […]