Many of the Institute and commodity servers have local partitions that are sometimes used to store data. These partitions are usually called /disk/data or /disk/scratch. In total, there is more than 7Tb of data on such disks! These locations are primarily intended for temporary data or data that can easily be regenerated. We are, however, […]

For some time now, we have been thinking about the form the Informatics Web presence should take in the future. From this, an Informatics web strategy has evolved, the highlights of which I’d like to cover in this post. The strategy itself can be found here. The main points of the strategy are: The majority […]

Below is a post from Information Services, warning about website hacking incidents that have happened recently within the University. If you are responsible for a website, or even just web pages, but particularily if you use a self run blog/wiki/WCMS, then it is a good idea to follow the advice given below and periodically Google […]

For many years, the School of Informatics has provided Windows and MacOS users with access to its file and printing resources via Samba. Since the introduction of the OpenAFS file system and the CUPS printing system, there have been better methods available for accessing these resources. Given this, the intention has always been to withdraw […]

The 2nd minor update to ScientificLinux 6 (which is based on RHEL6) is now ready for deployment to the Informatics SL6 DICE office 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 soon as they […]

As most of you will be aware, access to the School’s AFS file system requires that the user be in possession of a valid Kerberos ticket. Most of the time, this is handled behind the scenes and doesn’t cause any problems. Default Kerberos ticket is only valid for 18 hours though and this can cause […]

Back in summer 2009 we reviewed our School Database provision. The result of that review was to commence a project to re-factor both of the existing back and front ends. This project also “adopted” a number of additional areas not specifically covered in the original review, including: integration of the old IGS and ISS Access […]

Periodically, we test our preparedness for disasters by holding a mock disaster exercise. On 27th February, the computing staff were told that part of the roof of the Forum server room had collapsed due to flood damage and that this had destroyed a number of the server racks. Obviously in such a scenario, it would […]

Major updates have been provided for the firefox web browser and the thunderbird mail client on ScientificLinux 6 which will take us up to version 10 (Extended Support Release). These updates provide a large number of fixes for serious security holes as well as many feature enhancements. We have tested these updates and do not […]

It is possible to set up self-managed machines to use kerberos with ssh to connect to DICE machines without entering a password and we strongly recommend that you do this. We have created step-by-step instructions to help you set this up under Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. These instructions are also linked to from […]