(This is just a copy of the mail I sent to staff and students earlier in the week but with an additional item about the need to turn off self managed and admin office machines). As previously advised, work being carried out in connection with the new student centre means that there will be no […]

Over the next couple of weeks, inhabitants of the Forum will note the appearance of new Xerox MFD’s in the South West printing areas of the forum. These are mono devices which also function as photocopiers and (colour) scanners. The Forum dweller may also spot that the existing Xerox MFDs in the North East print […]

In order to minimize the risk to computing facilities during the strike action there will be a ‘change freeze’ for those computing systems managed by the School’s computing staff. This will be effective from Friday 23rd February to Wednesday 21st March (or the end of the industrial action). Obviously there may be some business critical […]

Last year I wrote an article extolling the virtues of cloud based printing and announcing the intention to extend the use of cloud printing to those parts of Informatics where it was not already available. With one or two exceptions, this proposal was greeted with some enthusiasm and so over the next few weeks, the […]

The Forum server rooms are covered by a pair of Uninterruptible Power Supplies (UPSes), one of which has developed a fault in its interface to the outside world.  As a result we can neither query its status, nor expect it to signal machines to shut down when the power goes off. UPS Repair Man came […]

There’s a new version of Virtual DICE, our lightweight DICE-like virtual machine. Here’s how to install it on your own computer. We release a new version of Virtual DICE twice a year. This version has the hostname sensa. It runs Scientific Linux 7.4, as DICE machines do. This version works better with Windows 10. To […]

As a measure to increase the overall security of our systems, we will shortly be introducing a policy where DICE accounts are suspended if they are inactive for 180 days. Please see here for details: http://computing.help.inf.ed.ac.uk/account-inactivity-suspension If you have any questions concerning this, please contact support in the usual way.

Recently we’ve been patching the DICE and Windows managed desktop computers to mitigate the Meltdown and Spectre attacks. We’ll continue to apply patches and fixes as they become available. If you use any other sort of computer in Informatics, it’s up to you to keep it updated with the latest fixes. See meltdownattack.com for a […]

Users of DICE machines may have noticed that system utilities such as getent and finger are no longer returning a full list of Informatics users. We use sssd (System Security Service Daemon) on DICE to cache LDAP data, such as user and group information. For finger to work with anything other than usernames, it requires […]

Cloud based printing is becoming more and more widespread across the University. Instead of needing to remember the queue name of the nearest printer, jobs are sent to a single cloud queue (to be strictly accurate, there are in fact two queues, one for mono jobs and one for colour) and can then be collected […]