For anyone looking to provide an SSL certified service IS (through JANET) can provide COMODO certified certificates which are valid for 1,2 or 3 years. The certificates can only be used for non commercial or financial purposes and are signed by a C.A. which is available in most web browsers. If you want to make […]

SL6 is the first upgrade of DICE we’ve done since we removed the last of the Schools Solaris servers. Given we’re unlikely to be buying more we’ve done some spring cleaning on the PATH, MANPATH and various other environmental variables. If you manipulate your PATH via .benv and setpath/pathfix you may find that it’s different […]

The 6th minor update to the, now slightly venerable, ScientificLinux 5 (based on RHEL5 which was first released on 2007-03-15) is now ready for deployment to the Informatics SL5 DICE office machines with the updates to the servers following over the next few weeks. A minor update like this provides us with the opportunity to […]

Some of you may be interested in how we have spent the Computing budget for 2010/2011. If you have any questions, please ask. Capital Expenditure Desktops (£90,000) – replacing 170 elderly and unreliable desktops and adding an additional 24 desktops to the Appleton Tower teaching labs. The new desktops are more capable of being put […]

A Lot of Trees Over 200000 sides of paper per month are printed within the School during term time, more than half of them emerging from the 6 AT computing lab printers. At a rough cost of 5p per side for mono printing and 30p per sheet for colour, this adds up to a considerable […]

We have now installed a new sl6_64 login server for staff. You can access it by using the alias, staff64.login. This will replace the existing staff.login machine and also the machine that is pointed to by the somewhat redundant aliases – atstaff.login, fhstaff.login, kbstaff.login, bpstaff.login and jcmbstaff.login! For now, we will leave the old aliases […]

Over the next few weeks, SL6 DICE desktop computers will start falling asleep when idle. The aim is to make them use less energy. At present most DICE desktops run F13 or SL5 DICE. These computers will not sleep any more than at present. Once they have been upgraded to SL6 they will mostly start […]

As announced a couple of months back, we shall shortly be upgrading DICE desktops to Scientific Linux 6 (SL6), starting with the teaching labs. We propose to take this opportunity to switch the default architecture from 32bit to 64bit. SL6 is fully supported on 64bit and we believe all of our local environment also works […]

With the DICE SL6 upgrade we will be formally decommissioning the schools two Condor pools over this summer. Condor is a system for stealing unused cpu cycles from distributed commodity computers for use as a High Throughput Computing platform. For some years we have been running condor on all the lab machines and a number […]

We have recently measured the average noise levels in the ‘self-managed server room’ (i.e. B.Z14) of the Informatics Forum. The noise levels are not excessive, and they don’t present any Health & Safety issues given our expected working practices – but they are higher than we might like, and some people might find them uncomfortable. […]