OpenAFS’s inability to use any encryption type other than single DES in the Kerberos tickets used to authenticate server-server and client-server communications has long been recognised as a major security shortcoming. 1DES’s relatively small key space renders it highly susceptible to a brute force attack and the wide availability of cheap distributed computing power, along […]

The 4th 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 […]

capturED is an easy-to-use, cost-effective system for automatically capturing event and lecture presentations, including the facility to broadcast events live online. We have now completed the testing of the CapturED facilities that have been installed in the Forum in G.07 and 4.31. The capturED facility which is provided by IS has been used extensively in […]

If WordPress spam concerns you, there are some plugins and extras that you might find useful, namely: Akismet, Anti-Spam, reCaptcha, and Comment-Control. These are available on blog.inf, but will need to be activated from your blog dashboard. Akismet …is a hosted web service that automatically detects comment and trackback spam. It’s free for personal use, […]

The Informatics blog service has been running an older version of the WordPress software for a while. At 1pm on Thursday 20th of June we plan to upgrade this to the current version (3.5.1). Our testing hasn’t shown any problems, and you can try out the new version at the temporary URL http://wobleg.inf.ed.ac.uk/ (this is […]

I am pleased to announce that we have appointed Chris Cooke to be Editor of the Computing documentation site. Chris will be responsible for overseeing the general structure of the site, ensuring that computing staff keep their documentation up-to-date and identifying and commissioning new content. If you wish to comment on existing content or suggest […]

It’s now very nearly five years since we moved into the Forum (time flies…), and in common with all our other computing equipment we now need to refresh the building’s network switches.  Rather than do the whole lot in one go, which would have had unfortunate effects on the remainder of the School’s equipment budget, […]

In order to make the process of searching for particular software packages slightly easier, there is now a web page available at: http://pkgsearch.inf.ed.ac.uk …which will allow you to search our local repositories using a single keyword or RPM string, with the option of tailoring the search to a specific software group, for 32- & 64-bit […]

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 […]

If you normally stay logged in to DICE overnight, read on. From Wednesday night (29 May) DICE desktops will be more likely to fall asleep. For some years our DICE desktops have slept when nobody was logged in and the computer seemed idle. From Wednesday they’ll also fall asleep even if a login session is […]