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 […]
The disk array ifevo3 has a fault with its flash memory. Though it may be just about possible to replace the faulty memory without disrupting the file service, the recommendation is to shut down the the disk array to do the work. So this is what we plan on doing. The data on ifevo3 is […]
As happened today, “Yesterday” isn’t always yesterday! A brief explanation. All AFS home directories (and some group areas) contain a Yesterday sub-directory. This directory contains a copy of your home directory from “Yesterday”, which can be useful if you accidentally delete a file. The Yesterday directory is actually a by-product of our backup system. “Yesterday” […]
AFS file space at risk this coming weekend.
A few weeks ago we rolled out some new sensible default apache configuration to all our web servers. These configuration changes will affect all DICE web servers unless their manager has chosen to exclude or modify some of these settings. This includes the few web services where the servers are managed DICE machines, but authorized […]
