We recently polled staff and research students in the School on some approaches and suggested technologies for moving forward with better and more integrated support for Video Conferencing in the School: https://wiki.inf.ed.ac.uk/DICE/VideoConferencing. That page has now been updated with a summary of all the comments received. The proposal now is that meeting room 5.02 in […]
Informatics has been selected to host one of the first five sponsored RIPE atlas anchors! The other four sites are in Macedonia, France, Romania and Albania. The RIPE atlas system consists of several thousand network “probes” dotted around the world. These perform a variety of standard and user-instigated measurements of hosts and services on the […]
Over the last couple of years, we have noticed that more and more of you are buying NAS appliances, boxes containing a number of commodity disks which can be attached to the network and serve that disk space to other machines on the network. This was a cause of concern to the computing staff because […]
Informatics is one of the few schools that maintains its own separately authenticated local user accounts (DICE) rather than using EASE/AD centrally managed accounts. Our accounts are automatically created and expired based on data we receive from the centre. However this is a much more complex process than at first might seem. We need to pull […]
If you sometimes struggle to remember passwords, a password manager can help. It’s a utility which can store your usernames and passwords in a strongly encrypted personal file, and which can generate random passwords for you. DICE has keepassx2. It can save passwords to a local file, which it encrypts securely. If you need to […]
Please take care when you type internet domain names, whether into an address box or at the command line! Domain-squatters are people who register internet domain names which are very similar to other “real” names. They do this in the hope of attracting mis-directed traffic, generally either for advertising purposes or so that they can […]
There have been a couple of changes to the local mail services recently. None of which Informatics users should have noticed, but for the record …
On Thursday 26th January we plan to upgrade the NX remote desktop service. All that will happen is that at about 09:00 we will change the DNS aliases (nx.inf and staff.nx.inf) to point to the new machines. This change can take some time to propagate so we will not immediately remove access to the old […]
The university information security office recommends keeping system software up to date as the first basic requirement to protect yourself online. Users of self-managed machines, particularly laptops and tablets that are used outside the School need to be particularly vigilant. Computing support rarely recommend installing the initial release of new software straight away, e.g. 10.12.0, […]
We are planning to upgrade the WordPress server providing blog.inf from SL6 to SL7, and to this end a clone of blog.inf running on SL7 has been set up. If you wish to test that your blog and any associated plugins behave as you expect under SL7, then take a look at the SL7 test […]
