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 […]
On Tuesday 28th October we plan to replace the NX server named bakerloo which hosts nx.inf.ed.ac.uk with a machine named piccadilly. All that will happen is that at about 09:00 on Tuesday we will change the DNS alias to point to the new machine. This change can take some time to propagate so we will […]
Yesterday evening, our SAN storage device satabeast2, suffered 2 disk failures. We can cope with 1 disk failure (RAID5), but following that first disk failure there is a period of time, while the redundancy is restored, that should a second disk fail then data will be lost. This is what happened yesterday. There is a […]
You can now follow us on twitter at @infalerts! We will post details of planned and unplanned outages, information on new services, changes to existing services and anything else that we think may be helpful to you as users of the IT services provided by Informatics. Information Services (IS) also post information about services they […]
The 5th 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 […]
