During the summer of 2023 all the student lab machines were upgraded from Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa) to 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish). Since then the Computing Team has been busy upgrading the user-accessible servers to the same platform. To ensure the ongoing security of our systems and provide a consistent environment for all users, we now […]

authenticator.cc is a handy way to generate MFA codes – those numbers that are sometimes demanded by Microsoft online services such as Teams, email and SharePoint. It’s a web browser extension, and it works with Firefox, Google Chrome, or Microsoft Edge. It gives you a button on your browser which, when you click it, generates […]

You can now find them at https://mastodon.social/@infalerts We occasionally post systems alerts when network or computing facilities suffer an outage which seems bad enough to stop people from reaching University or School of Informatics systems. Previously we used a Twitter account for that, but since those accounts are no longer reliably visible to people who aren’t […]

We’re pleased to announce a new version of Virtual DICE for 2023–24. Here’s how to download it. What’s Virtual DICE? The managed Linux machines here in the School of Informatics run an environment which we call DICE. It’s based on Ubuntu Linux. We use DICE on desktop computers and on servers, but there’s also a […]

(Now updated to mention otpclient.) As you may know, the University is introducing MFA, or Multi-Factor Authentication. It’s doing this to increase security, to protect us from increasingly severe online threats. At the moment MFA is specifically for Microsoft services – Teams, email, SharePoint, Office 365, and so on. What is MFA? In practice what […]

We will be upgrading the Informatics XRDP Remote Desktop (remote.inf) cluster from Ubuntu Focal to Jammy on Thursday this week (14th September). The work will begin at approximately 09:00 and we expect the service to be unavailable for several hours. Whilst the service is unavailable those users with DICE desktops can access that via RDP […]

What you need to know In the next few weeks quite a few Informatics web servers – and other computing services – will be shut down for a short time. Most of them will go down for only a few minutes, but a few servers will have to be down for an hour or two. […]

It’s that time of year again! We need to reboot our network switches to apply some firmware upgrades, and also to reset their uptime counters before they overflow. We’re planning to do these reboots in the evenings over the next few days, so you may notice some small downtime while your edge switch reboots. There […]

The project to replace EdLAN reached another milestone recently, with the completion of the migration of all subnets away from the old EdLAN core routers across to the new EdLAN distribution routers.  There’s now some tidying-up to be done, and the parts which might affect us in Informatics are scheduled for Tuesday 23rd. Specifically, some […]

Please be aware of a current wave of phishing emails which purport to be voicemails with subjects such as “Voicemail (48 secs)”. These are scams designed to trick you into supplying various login and personal details, they are being sent from compromised accounts, which is why they look real. Please do not open these emails, […]