The 5th 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 […]

On Tuesday 26th August we plan to replace the SSH server named hogwood which hosts staff.ssh.inf.ed.ac.uk with a machine named brendel. All that will happen is that at about 09:00 on Tuesday we will change the DNS aliases to point to the new machine. This change can take some time to propagate so we will […]

We recently added a second NX server, staff.nx.inf.ed.ac.uk. The first NX server, nx.inf.ed.ac.uk, is unchanged. NX is the remote graphical login facility, offering a DICE desktop from a Windows, Mac or Linux machine anywhere on the internet. staff.nx.inf.ed.ac.uk is for staff, research postgraduates and visitors. nx.inf.ed.ac.uk is still accessible to all Informatics users. If you […]

Following the changes noted in my recent article, the Forum network appears to have been stable again.  If you’re still experiencing problems, please report them through the support form in the usual way and we’ll look into them. As a separate issue, a number of central University services were affected by a firewall problem on […]

I’m sorry to report that we shall not be upgrading the DICE teaching desktop platform this summer. This means that the DICE teaching platform will be SL6 based for another academic year. We had hoped to upgrade to a free derivative of Redhat Enterprise 7 (RHEL 7) this summer, but unfortunately RHEL 7 has only […]

You may have noticed some periods of instability with our Forum network recently.  This has proved hard to diagnose as one of the first things to be hit would be the management interfaces to our network switches, so that obtaining useful data (indeed, any data at all) during an event was problematic.  However, we believe […]

A big thank you to all of you who took the time to complete the recent survey on the areas of the Informatics Computing Service where mobile (mobile in this context meaning a smartphone or tablet rather than a conventional laptop) support could be improved. 99 people responded and the results make interesting reading. We […]

The University’s license for the Kaspersky Anti-Virus software expires on 30th April 2014. If you are running a copy of Kaspersky on a self-managed machine using the University License, you must remove it manually and replace it. The replacement anti-virus software is System Center Endpoint Protection (SCEP) which is currently licensed for use on University-owned […]

The School produces an annual computing plan which :- states our current strategic objectives reports on goals set in the previous year’s plan lists goals for the current calendar year provides feedback and input to Information Services The plan is available, along with plans for previous years, on the Computing Strategy Group wiki.

Windows XP was first launched in 2001 and Microsoft have now withdrawn support for XP as of 8th April. There is a useful page giving full details: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-GB/windows/end-support-help It does recommend upgrading to Windows 8.1 but you may find that your machine is not capable of running Windows 8 in which case you may prefer […]