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 […]
Following on from the recent reminder of disruption to Informatics and central University systems on Tuesday 10th January, here is a bit more detail. A fault was recently identified in the Appleton Tower “essential services” electrical supply, which amongst other things powers the basement server room which houses many Informatics and central University systems. Unfortunately […]
The lecture capture system (capturED) that has been in place throughout the University for a number of years is now no longer supported by IS. As a result of the efforts of AHSS (in particular, the Business School), CSE has found an alternative (Panopto) which has been piloted and is now installed in the majority […]
On 20th October 2016 it was announced that a serious security hole had been discovered in the Linux kernel which was already being actively exploited. This vulnerability has been dubbed "Dirty COW" due to the exploit using a race condition in the implementation of the copy-on-write mechanism. Although described as a local exploit the bug […]
A new version of Virtual DICE is now available for download. (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. We use DICE on desktop computers and on servers, but we also […]
