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 […]
We have introduced a new password policy for DICE accounts: http://computing.help.inf.ed.ac.uk/password-policy The significant changes made to the previous policy are: We now have a more flexible approach to the number of character classes required in any password – specifically that the longer the password, the fewer number of distinct character classes is required. All password […]
The “IPv6 investigation” project has made good progress since my previous post in January. We have had global connectivity since February, and have been testing on a variety of subnets since then, including all of our “server” subnets, and most recently the “Appleton Tower” (including Forrest Hill and Wilkie) managed DICE desktop subnet. We have […]
We need to upgrade the general access SSH server (schiff) to SL7. We plan to start this work at 9am on Tuesday 16th August. We expect the service to be unavailable for approximately 2 hours, we will send out another message when the work has been completed. During the period of downtime an alternative SSH […]
Git is a version control system which has become very popular within Informatics. In fact it has become so popular that we are now offering no less that three different Git related services within the School! At this point, if you are familiar with Git, you may be wondering why we bother since it is […]
