DICE is also available as a virtual machine. We call it Virtual DICE. It can run in a variety of environments – Windows, Linux, Mac, and so on. The computing help pages give details on how to download, install and use it. Virtual DICE was previously in testing. It’s now a supported service, so please […]

Following the unplanned power cut on Tuesday, one of our SAN machines (ifevo4) started reporting a problem with the flash cache memory in one of its controllers. The machine has two controllers, A and B, for redundancy. Both with two fibre channel (FC) connections, one to each of our fabrics (network). This means that should […]

As part of our rolling programme of network upgrades and replacement of old kit, the following have either happened or are planned to happen soon: The remaining “gigabit” switches in the Forum will be replaced with current models, completing the process of upgrading these switches which was begun last year.  Ports with labels beginning 4/B, […]

On Tuesday 4th of March there was a period of a few minutes, from 11:15am to about 11:25am, when most peoples’ home directory quota was incorrectly shrunk to 2MB. Anything trying to write to home directories during that time will have failed. This happened because the script, to calculate peoples’ quota, had not been updated […]

Every now and then, we test our preparedness for disasters by holding a mock disaster exercise. On the 13th January, the computing staff were told that over the preceding weekend, as a result of a gas explosion in the basement of Appleton Tower, all of our IT equipment in the AT basement had been destroyed. […]

Redhat, who provide the Linux platform on which DICE is based, has recently released a beta version of their latest release – RHEL 7. We have started work on porting DICE to this platform, with a view to upgrading DICE desktops to a RHEL 7 based platform this summer. This will result in many core […]

This article describes a couple of security enhancements which the Computing Team will be developing over the next few months. As I mentioned  last time, we have recently started scanning all our externally-visible machines for security vulnerabilities using the JANET ESISS penetration-testing service.  In order to use the service as effectively as possible we need […]

Users of self-managed machines are reminded that School policy requires that they should make all reasonable efforts to secure those machines.  This applies particularly to those which have firewall holes. Machines must be running a current OS version, and patching must be kept up-to-date.  If you have any services running, please make sure that you […]

Please help to reduce the University’s energy bill by switching off any equipment, including computers and monitors, that you are unlikely to use over the Xmas break. If you are responsible for research group servers, please consider powering these down over the vacation. Contact support if you need computing staff to do this for you. […]

We have received a replacement for the SAN controller that failed following the power cut of the 11th of November. We had to abort our plan to replace it yesterday (Monday 18th) after we discovered there’s not enough slack in the cables to manoeuvre the failed controller out and the replacement controller in. Unfortunately this […]