In line with current best practice we will shortly be removing the RC4 stream cipher from our Apache HTTPS sites. Indeed we’ve already removed it from https://wiki.inf.ed.ac.uk without any apparent issues. For more details see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RC4 Modern browsers will connect via one of the various other SSL ciphers that we support. However, please do let […]
As reported in previous posts (Upgrade of DICE desktops to SL7, Seven), we have been working hard on preparing DICE for upgrade to Scientific Linux 7. We are on track to begin upgrading DICE desktops in May, completing the teaching labs by the start of academic year 2015/2016 and all desktops by Xmas 2015. We […]
Last year I wrote about a couple of network security projects which were in their early stages of development. As the last of these has recently completed, I thought it might be useful to summarise their outcomes. We have had edge filtering in place for a long time, since we ran Solaris on Suns in […]
New Virtual DICE VM images are available for download. A lot of software has been updated, but the big news is that the VMs now include Java. A careful review of the licence conditions suggested that we were after all allowed to do this! Virtual DICE is the School’s DICE Linux, but running in a […]
In November 2014 the remaining end user vestiges of the legacy school database service originating in 1996 were migrated into Theon. The areas and workflows that were transitioned at this time were: Staff Records Visitor Records Post Application Visit Day handling for UG students Taught PG student admissions handling The School InfHR team were moved across […]
In order to maintain the integrity of our systems we need to reboot all DICE desktops over the next few days. We understand that reboots can be very inconvenient so you can be assured that we will only ever schedule reboots which we consider to be essential. A delayed reboot has been scheduled for all […]
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 […]
