A big thank you to all of you who took the time to complete the recent survey on the areas of the Informatics Computing Service where mobile (mobile in this context meaning a smartphone or tablet rather than a conventional laptop) support could be improved. 99 people responded and the results make interesting reading. We […]
The University’s license for the Kaspersky Anti-Virus software expires on 30th April 2014. If you are running a copy of Kaspersky on a self-managed machine using the University License, you must remove it manually and replace it. The replacement anti-virus software is System Center Endpoint Protection (SCEP) which is currently licensed for use on University-owned […]
The School produces an annual computing plan which :- states our current strategic objectives reports on goals set in the previous year’s plan lists goals for the current calendar year provides feedback and input to Information Services The plan is available, along with plans for previous years, on the Computing Strategy Group wiki.
Windows XP was first launched in 2001 and Microsoft have now withdrawn support for XP as of 8th April. There is a useful page giving full details: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-GB/windows/end-support-help It does recommend upgrading to Windows 8.1 but you may find that your machine is not capable of running Windows 8 in which case you may prefer […]
DICE is also available as a virtual machine. We call it Virtual DICE. It can run in a variety of environments – Windows, Linux, Mac, and so on. The computing help pages give details on how to download, install and use it. Virtual DICE was previously in testing. It’s now a supported service, so please […]
Following the unplanned power cut on Tuesday, one of our SAN machines (ifevo4) started reporting a problem with the flash cache memory in one of its controllers. The machine has two controllers, A and B, for redundancy. Both with two fibre channel (FC) connections, one to each of our fabrics (network). This means that should […]
As part of our rolling programme of network upgrades and replacement of old kit, the following have either happened or are planned to happen soon: The remaining “gigabit” switches in the Forum will be replaced with current models, completing the process of upgrading these switches which was begun last year. Ports with labels beginning 4/B, […]
On Tuesday 4th of March there was a period of a few minutes, from 11:15am to about 11:25am, when most peoples’ home directory quota was incorrectly shrunk to 2MB. Anything trying to write to home directories during that time will have failed. This happened because the script, to calculate peoples’ quota, had not been updated […]
Every now and then, we test our preparedness for disasters by holding a mock disaster exercise. On the 13th January, the computing staff were told that over the preceding weekend, as a result of a gas explosion in the basement of Appleton Tower, all of our IT equipment in the AT basement had been destroyed. […]
Redhat, who provide the Linux platform on which DICE is based, has recently released a beta version of their latest release – RHEL 7. We have started work on porting DICE to this platform, with a view to upgrading DICE desktops to a RHEL 7 based platform this summer. This will result in many core […]
