The decant from Appleton Tower to Forrest Hill and the Wilkie Building is now well underway. The first move to Forrest Hill took place over the weekend 23rd/24th May. The Graduate School were mostly all up and running again before lunchtime on Monday 25th May. We spent most of the rest of the week installing […]

We have recently implemented automated processing of the final stages of a user account’s lifecycle within our account management system, ‘Prometheus’. [1] This is used to apply expiry (or ‘grace’) and suspension periods to an account, as described in our account closure policy. [2] All user accounts have ‘roles’ and ‘entitlements’. These are used by […]

As we prepare to decant from Appleton Tower to Forrest Hill and Wilkie Building, I thought it might be useful to describe how we’re networking the buildings and why we’ve done it the way we have. In short, both FH and Wilkie will be operated as virtual floors of Appleton Tower.  This makes it straightforward […]

The disk array ifevo3 has a fault with its flash memory. Though it may be just about possible to replace the faulty memory without disrupting the file service, the recommendation is to shut down the the disk array to do the work. So this is what we plan on doing. The data on ifevo3 is […]

As reported in previous posts (Upgrade of DICE desktops to SL7, Seven), we have been working hard on preparing DICE for upgrade to Scientific Linux 7. We are on track to begin upgrading DICE desktops in May, completing the teaching labs by the start of academic year 2015/2016 and all desktops by Xmas 2015. We […]

Last year I wrote about a couple of network security projects which were in their early stages of development.  As the last of these has recently completed, I thought it might be useful to summarise their outcomes. We have had edge filtering in place for a long time, since we ran Solaris on Suns in […]

New Virtual DICE VM images are available for download. A lot of software has been updated, but the big news is that the VMs now include Java. A careful review of the licence conditions suggested that we were after all allowed to do this! Virtual DICE is the School’s DICE Linux, but running in a […]

In November 2014 the remaining end user vestiges of the legacy school database service originating in 1996 were migrated into Theon. The areas and workflows that were transitioned at this time were: Staff Records Visitor Records Post Application Visit Day handling for UG students Taught PG student admissions handling The School InfHR team were moved across […]

In order to maintain the integrity of our systems we need to reboot all DICE desktops over the next few days. We understand that reboots can be very inconvenient so you can be assured that we will only ever schedule reboots which we consider to be essential. A delayed reboot has been scheduled for all […]

As described in my November posting, we’re making some changes to our OpenVPN configuration, partly to support new devices, partly to add capacity, and partly because one of the features we currently use is being phased out. The server-end changes are now all in place, as are the new configuration files needed on the client […]