EdLAN is increasingly embracing site-local (“RFC1918“) addresses, and as a consequence we are beginning to see services being given such addresses. (A good argument could be made that the use of such addresses implies that they should never be accessible from elsewhere, but for at least some of these services it’s not obvious that that […]

Over the next few months all those with an existing SL7 DICE desktop will be contacted by the Computing Support Team to arrange for it to be upgraded to Ubuntu 20.04 (focal fossa) . We are aiming to upgrade all staff/PhD desktops by Easter 2021, but if you would like your machine upgraded sooner you […]

We are very pleased to announce that the Informatics managed Linux desktop environment (DICE) has been ported to Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa). After 5 years of service our Scientific Linux 7 (SL7) based desktop environment is showing its age. In particular, this has begun to make it difficult to provide the latest versions of software […]

All Professional Services staff and a few other staff within Informatics have already successfully moved from staffmail to Office 365. With the retiral of the staffmail service, IS are now in a position to complete the move of all remaining staffmail accounts to office365. They will commence the process at the end of this month, […]

We’re changing the *.remote.inf.ed.ac.uk Remote Desktop service to remove some of the machines. However, everybody will still be able to use the service as before. Back in the spring, we made ten machines available for remote desktop sessions under the name UUN.remote.inf.ed.ac.uk where UUN is your University username. (For instance, my username is cc so […]

Users of AFS on MacOS may be mildly perturbed to find out that the MacOS AFS client has until recently contained a couple of critical bugs which could result in permanent loss of data if triggered. For this reason, we are advising all MacOS AFS users to update to the latest version of the AFS […]

Prior to lockdown we only had a single “staff” server and a single “student” server but with the need to provide adequate facilities to allow working from home, we had to expand our provision. Based on the work of FreeRDP and rdesktop, xrdp uses the remote desktop protocol to present a GUI to the user. […]

Just before the shutdown we replaced some lab machines with desktops with lower spec GPUs These are elitedesk 800 g4s with gtx 1060 cards which can be used for development work and for short or small scale processing. Please do not run long jobs on them or your jobs will be killed. Physically the machines […]

As we prepare to enable IPv6 on the “static self-managed” wires, there are a few aspects to IPv6 addressing which you need to know. The most obvious difference between IPv4 and IPv6 addresses is that the latter are 128 bits log.  They’re conventionally divided up into eight 16-bit chunks, written in hex and separated by […]

Following the introduction of IPv6 for the Forum self-managed dynamic-address subnet (and the ironing out of a couple of teething problems), we would now like to roll IPv6 out to the two “static-self-managed” subnets (“SM164” and “SM197”). We propose enabling this on Monday 10th February, at lunch-time.  To do this we will set up the […]