As described in my November posting, we’re making some changes to our OpenVPN configuration, partly to support new devices, partly to add capacity, and partly because one of the features we currently use is being phased out. The server-end changes are now all in place, as are the new configuration files needed on the client […]
When the Forum meeting rooms were set up, we configured the wired network in them to use the “office self-managed DHCP” subnet. This seemed appropriate at the time, as most users were expected to be Forum occupants. The ground-floor meeting areas, in contrast, were set up to use a separate “conferences” subnet, outside the Informatics […]
On the evening of 6th January, one of the disks in the IBM storage array used to provide storage for KVM guests at the Forum decided to go faulty. As with other storage arrays, this should not have been a major issue. One of the hot spares should have been brought on-line and the array […]
As many of you are aware, the standard versions of various developer tools provided in Scientific Linux 6 (e.g. gcc) have now become quite old. To gain access to newer versions you can now have various software collections added to your system. These are extra packages provided by Redhat, details are available on the computing […]
We have now resolved the hardware problems with the new hardware for the staff NX server so we can reschedule the planned upgrade. On Tuesday 6th January we plan to replace the staff NX server named central which hosts staff.nx.inf.ed.ac.uk with a machine named northern. All that will happen is that at about 09:00 on […]
We have recently discovered a problem with the cron daemon (cronie) which is supplied with SL6 and SL7 which means that users with home directories stored in AFS have been prevented from using the service on DICE machines. We have now patched the code and are satisfied that normal service has now been resumed. This […]
Earlier this year we conducted a survey of VM/cloud usage. The project has now concluded and a formal report on the project can be found on the Rat Unit wiki This includes a link to the survey report itself. Copies of all the documentation relating to the project can be found in afs in the […]
It’s now over ten years since we first set up our OpenVPN service, and things have moved on quite a bit since then. So far we have managed to maintain compatibility for existing users of the service, but we would now like to make a couple of enhancements which unfortunately do require incompatible changes: We […]
You may remember that DICE Linux is not getting the major upgrade this summer (DICE teaching platform upgrade – postponed) that we optimistically forecast in February (Upgrade of DICE desktops to Scientific Linux 7). This post explains what’s been going on. DICE Linux is based on Scientific Linux, which is based on Red Hat Enterprise […]
On Tuesday 4th November we plan to replace the staff NX server named central which hosts staff.nx.inf.ed.ac.uk with a machine named northern. All that will happen is that at about 09:00 on Tuesday we will change the DNS aliases to point to the new machine. This change can take some time to propagate so we […]
