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 […]
We’re pleased to announce a new version of Virtual DICE for the 2017-18 session. Here’s how to download it. If you don’t know what Virtual DICE is, read on. The managed Linux machines here in the School of Informatics run an environment which we call DICE. It’s based on Linux. We use DICE on desktop […]
The new lecture recording facility, MediaHopper Replay, is now live (as of 5th September) and by the start of teaching, the service will be available in 114 teaching spaces. Further details can be found on the IS page which includes a link to help and support web pages. There are still training sessions available and […]
The standard versions of various developer tools provided as part of a Scientific Linux release (e.g. SL6 or SL7) can become quite old. To gain access to newer versions various software collections can be added to a system. Redhat summarises the software collections as: “For certain applications, more recent versions of some software components are […]
Good news! We are extending the Forum self-managed server room facility by adding three brand new racks in a nearby room. Bad news! To arrange the necessary power feeds to the new room, we will need to completely switch off the power to the existing self-managed server room for a short period next week. The […]
