Singularity container platform is now available on Ubuntu DICE. Singularity is a container platform, perhaps the most well-supported Docker alternative. It allows you to run containers that package up pieces of software in a way that is portable and reproducible. You can build or download pre-built images from external resources (including Docker Hub) and run […]

As you’ll all be aware, the University is tightening up on network security in response to outside threats.    Within Informatics we have also been looking at ways to improve our security, and one area we have identified is that of self-managed machines in offices. For many years we have provided network ports in offices and […]

As you’ll be aware by now, EdLAN is changing, though rather more slowly than was originally anticipated for various reasons, and the way that Informatics connects to it has to change too. Under the old EdLAN, the Informatics network in the central area (Forum, Appleton Tower, Bayes and Wilkie) had a 10Gbps connection to the […]

The Chief Information Security Officer for the University announced on Monday 21st March that all users of the University VPN service MUST reset their password. Users of the Informatics OpenVPN service are not affected. Note that, as this is a centrally provided service, any queries or support requests must be directed to Information Services. Here […]

Following Russia’s attack on Ukraine, the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) is calling on all UK organisations to increase their vigilance for cyber attacks. It is clear that various groups are now using this crisis as an opportunity to launch new phishing email attacks. For example, there are scams asking people to "Help Ukraine" and […]

It’s time for us to arrange to reboot most of our network switches again.  We need to do this for a couple of reasons. The first is that the clocks that they use for management and reporting purposes tick in centiseconds.  That means that they wrap at just under 497 days of uptime, which in […]

As part of the EdLAN replacement project, contractors are working their way round all of the University’s buildings to swap out the wireless access points for new ones.  The Bayes building has already been done (on Tuesday 18th January), and the Informatics Forum is the next one where we’ll see this happen.  This is scheduled […]

Sometimes you need to run software which needs a lot of oomph behind it, and which can take days to run. It’s a bit impractical to run that sort of thing on a normal desktop – which is why Informatics has compute servers. Until recently there was one for staff (called staff.compute.inf.ed.ac.uk) and one for […]

By now most people are probably aware of the recent discovery of multiple critical security issues in the Java log4j logging library (version 2) which have been named “log4shell“. In some circumstances, these flaws can give attackers the ability to remotely execute their code on our systems. An overview can be found on Wikipedia. Since […]

We’ve added a second student compute server, and it’s called student2.compute.inf.ed.ac.uk. Students can login to it like this: ssh student2.compute.inf.ed.ac.uk We’ve done this because in recent days the student compute server (student.compute.inf.ed.ac.uk) has been unresponsive at times, because it’s been used so enthusiastically. There’s a range of things we could do to help, and we’re […]