An overview of what browsers are available on DICE

In early October 2011 we discovered that the School of Informatics SSH service had been seriously compromised. Since that time our Computing Team has been working very hard to thoroughly investigate the circumstances of the event and provide a robust response. As part of the response to this event we have written a detailled report. […]

We now have a web page which can wake sleeping computers. It should wake most of our desktop machines (though not HP 7900 computers – see below). You can find it at wake.inf.ed.ac.uk. It seems a bad idea to let anyone on the internet wake any of our computers, so there are a few restrictions: […]

Following this mornings unplanned restart of one of the Forum SAN storage machines, various AFS volumes (where your files are stored) have been affected. We are bringing these back on-line a partition at a time. Unfortunately there is a delay as we check each partition for file system consistency, to make sure there’s been no […]

Back in August in a post entitled Macs in Informatics I asked for views on, well, Macs in Informatics, but specifically on configuring them to access DICE services, and whether we should look at trying to provide some sort of automated help with that configuration. I had an excellent response – thank you very much, […]

LaTeX is part of the standard installation on DICE desktop machines. This installation includes local files which can be found in the following directory on SL6 machines: /usr/share/texmf/tex/latex/informatics/ The support team will maintain the local .sty, .cls and .def files and therefore you should request any changes to these files using the support form which […]

The open access printers in Appleton Tower are now part of the University’s central printing system. This means you have to have credit in your University “Print and Copy” account before you can print. All undergraduate students and taught MSc students have been given an initial credit. Further information about the charges and how to […]

The 1st 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 […]

For DICE office desktop machines any user may power-off or reboot when they are on the console (i.e. logged into the machine which is sat in front of them). Beyond this (e.g. when logged in via ssh) we have traditionally required root access for a reboot or power-off operation. This is particularly inconvenient for a […]

If you use a Mac, this post is for you. I’m asking for the opinions of Mac users. There seem to be a lot of Macs in Informatics. Macs can be configured to access DICE services – for example AFS, printing, backups – but sometimes this can be excessively fiddly or difficult. I’m looking into […]