IPv6 was standardised around 15 years ago, primarily as a way to address the anticipated exhaustion of IPv4 address space, and since then we have had a steady trickle of people asking whether they could have one to use on the University’s network. Until now we have had to turn these down, unfortunately, as our […]
Edit: this work has now been done. To enable hardware maintenance a number of services and websites will be unavailable for a short while – read on for details. The following services and sites will be unavailable between about 10am and 11am on Tuesday 1 September, after which they’ll reappear: energy-hub.inf.ed.ac.uk Commercialisation web sites including […]
We have several terabytes of new disk space to attach to our SAN. Unfortunately this will mean shutting down the disk array ifevo3 to do the work. The data on ifevo3 is nearly all group space, plus some of our system/backup data. While ifevo3 is down, the group space listed below will be unavailable. To […]
Magnetic tape is viewed as a somewhat outdated medium by many people these days but for backing up larges amounts of data over a long period of time (and Informatics has a lot of data to back up), it still offers by far the best value for money. Our old Overland Neo8000 has served us […]
Porting DICE to a new version of the Redhat platform is a non trivial task. For a flavour of the work involved, you can read the final report for the base platform upgrade project. Note that this doesn’t include the additional work in updating all the teaching and software packages that we add to Redhat.
The 6th minor update to ScientificLinux 6 (which is based on RHEL6) is now ready for deployment to the Informatics SL6 DICE office and student lab machines. A minor update like this provides us with the opportunity to update important software and fix any bugs which are not security issues (we apply security updates as […]
We’ve recently been getting an increased number of support tickets about problems accessing Student Services pages. The common thread in most of these tickets is that the person involved is incorrectly trying to do so using an HTTPS URL. In the case of the Student Services pages, HTTPS is used to authenticate you, and then […]
The decant from Appleton Tower to Forrest Hill and the Wilkie Building is now well underway. The first move to Forrest Hill took place over the weekend 23rd/24th May. The Graduate School were mostly all up and running again before lunchtime on Monday 25th May. We spent most of the rest of the week installing […]
We have recently implemented automated processing of the final stages of a user account’s lifecycle within our account management system, ‘Prometheus’. [1] This is used to apply expiry (or ‘grace’) and suspension periods to an account, as described in our account closure policy. [2] All user accounts have ‘roles’ and ‘entitlements’. These are used by […]
As we prepare to decant from Appleton Tower to Forrest Hill and Wilkie Building, I thought it might be useful to describe how we’re networking the buildings and why we’ve done it the way we have. In short, both FH and Wilkie will be operated as virtual floors of Appleton Tower. This makes it straightforward […]
