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 […]
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 […]
