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 […]
We will soon be replacing all existing 100 Mb/s network switches in all of the Informatics Forum IT closets with new 1Gb/s switches. There are 17 IT closets in the Forum, each of which provides networking connectivity to its nearby offices. Typically, each closet contains three or four 100 Mb/s switches – so there is […]
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 […]
The web server that hosts the groups.inf.ed.ac.uk web site (and various others) is one of the last to be upgraded to SL7. I had hoped to squeeze it in before the end of the year, but it will now happen on Friday January 12th 2018. The groups.inf web server actually hosts multiple sites, the main […]
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 […]
