It’s now easier to see whether or not your account has been compromised. As part of our ongoing work to enhance the security of the computing infrastructure within the School of Informatics we have developed a new web interface which allows users to review their recent login activity. The site is accessible at: https://cabin.inf.ed.ac.uk/authview/ This […]

We want to save energy, so we try to ensure that DICE computers sleep when idle. The graph below shows how many DICE desktops were asleep during each hour of a recent week. It was produced by David Sterratt, and I’d like to thank him for his work on it and for his interest in […]

A number of users of our self-managed “DHCP” subnet experienced problems accessing the network starting some time on Saturday 20th up until 14:45 on Monday 22nd.  We believe that this was caused by a rogue DHCP server, and that disabling its network access restored the service for everyone else. Please be careful when adding devices […]

On Tuesday 16th April we plan to replace the SSH server named “dunlin” which hosts student.ssh.inf.ed.ac.uk and ssh.inf.ed.ac.uk with a machine named “kubelik”. 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 […]

You can now find a summary of the responses to the Student Survey carried out last year. We found the responses very helpful in planning and prioritising some changes which include: 1. Improved documentation Our new documentation was announced recently – see http://computing.help.inf.ed.ac.uk 2. Improving awareness of services e.g. afs, openvpn, vnc, student.compute 3. Looking […]

One of the outcomes from the 2012 student survey was a decision to increase the AFS home directory quotas for all users. The new limits agreed were: UG1/UG2 – 2GB UG3/UG4/PGT – 5GB Staff/PGR – 10GB Unfortunately, our policy of not overloading student partitions (that is not allocating more space for users use than the […]

The web server that hosts the groups/conferences/workshops/events.inf.ed.ac.uk web sites, and various other research sites, is long overdue an upgrade. Currently it is still running the SL5 OS, whereas virtually all other DICE computers are SL6.3. If things go to plan, the switchover date will be Thursday 24th of January at 1pm. During which time all […]

The following dates have been set for IS Network Services to perform essential replacement work on the core EdLAN network routers: Appleton Tower – Saturday 19th January 2013 08:00-10:00 (then at risk 10:00-12:00) The Appleton Tower work will cause an outage for our bridged network services in both the Forum and AT.  In particular, VoIP […]

Wireless networking spectrum is a scarce resource.  In the 2.4GHz band (“802.11b/g”) there are essentially only three non-overlapping channels available.  Things are not quite as tight in the 5GHz band (“802.11a”), but there is by no means generous provision there either.  To make matters worse, these are not dedicated WiFi bands,  but are shared with […]

I’d like to draw users’ attention to the following, recently posted on one of our CO blogs: “The Research and Teaching unit recently noted that users’ crontabs (sometimes required, for example, on research servers to start or check on custom services) are not routinely backed up […] the purpose of this post is simply to […]