I’m pleased to be able to announce the availability of a much requested backup service for self-managed machines running most varieties of Linux/Unix, Windows (XP, Vista and 7) and Mac-OS. Full details of how to start using the service can be found at https://wiki.inf.ed.ac.uk/view/DICE/ServicesUnitInstallingTibsClient. This service uses the same software, hardware and backup intervals as […]

The weekly update to DICE which went out yesterday (Wednesday 4th May 2011) saw the introduction of VirtualBox version 4.0.4 to replace, the now rather ancient, versions 3.1 and 3.2. If you are using an SL5 or SL6 based desktop machine then this new version will be automatically installed the next time the machine is […]

One of our VMware host servers has dropped off the network twice this week for no apparent reason. We are going to reboot the server (and its virtual servers) at 8am on Friday 29th April to see if this fixes the problem. The affected services are :- OpenConf service ISS RT Seacliffe (Qualnet licence server) […]

A bit belatedly we discovered that our two running Plone services were potentially vulnerable to an escalation of privileges exploit. Looking through the logs with the checker they provided, and the fact that we use Cosign authentication for most of our sites, seems to say that our sites have not been compromised in this way. […]

There was a brief interruption to Institute websites this morning (10:34-10:40). This followed the creation of a new Plone website, and was due to a race condition in the automatic configuration process that stopped the web server daemon from restarting. It appears that apache tried to restart before the cosign configuration process had created a […]

We often get asked to install Dropbox on DICE, it hasn’t happened before now, mostly for reasons that are probably too long and boring to go into on the systems blog (but if you’re interested). However if you have hand crafted an install on DICE or are using it you may want to be aware […]

The machine hosting the staff.ssh service (rydell) crashed on the evening of Tuesday 12th April. This was caused by a runaway process which consumed all available memory. The machine was rebooted at 6:30am on Wednesday 13th April and is now working normally. For those interested in the details, the Linux kernel Out-Of-Memory (OOM) killer did […]

Here’s some news: we’ve moved the DICE weekly release from Thursday to Wednesday afternoons. If you’re already tempted to move on, let me explain. Most of the configuration of a DICE machine – what software is installed, who can login, security arrangements, that sort of thing – is handled automatically by our LCFG configuration system. […]

We’ve turned off some of the machines which normally form part of the DICE Beowulf and Hadoop clusters. At the moment the Forum’s server room is running with only one of its UPSes rather than the normal two, so we’ve cut our electricity consumption slightly until we get the second UPS back. One obvious target […]

This post is mainly just to announce that the student lab machines can now be woken from sleep in the way one might reasonably expect: with a key press or mouse click. Previously they could only be woken by pressing the machine’s power button. As the author of the LCFG sleep component which configures these […]