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 […]
This article describes a couple of security enhancements which the Computing Team will be developing over the next few months. As I mentioned last time, we have recently started scanning all our externally-visible machines for security vulnerabilities using the JANET ESISS penetration-testing service. In order to use the service as effectively as possible we need […]
Users of self-managed machines are reminded that School policy requires that they should make all reasonable efforts to secure those machines. This applies particularly to those which have firewall holes. Machines must be running a current OS version, and patching must be kept up-to-date. If you have any services running, please make sure that you […]
Please help to reduce the University’s energy bill by switching off any equipment, including computers and monitors, that you are unlikely to use over the Xmas break. If you are responsible for research group servers, please consider powering these down over the vacation. Contact support if you need computing staff to do this for you. […]
We have received a replacement for the SAN controller that failed following the power cut of the 11th of November. We had to abort our plan to replace it yesterday (Monday 18th) after we discovered there’s not enough slack in the cables to manoeuvre the failed controller out and the replacement controller in. Unfortunately this […]
We suffered a power failure in the Informatics Forum on Monday 11th November 2013, starting at about 11am and ending at about 1pm. We still have no information from Estates and Buildings as to why this failure occured. Many users were surprised to find that whilst power to their desktops and the network wasn’t interrupted, […]
As people using the University’s EASE web login page will have hopefully noticed, the look of https://www.ease.ed.ac.uk will be changing at 8am on the 5th of November. The image below shows you what to expect, there may be small differences, but generally it will look like the following: So rest assured this change is legitimate […]
On September 1st, 2013 the University of Edinburgh introduced a Total Academic Headcount (TAH) site licence for the Mathworks MATLAB® application and the MATLAB® Distributed Computing Server. This new TAH license will replace all our existing School provided research and teaching licenses. In brief summary it allows unrestricted concurrent access for all staff and students […]
With the upgrade to Sl6.4 we have opted not to upgrade the gridengine based beowulf cluster and this service is now decommissioned. The hardware is now fairly elderly and ECDF/Eddie provides an equivalent service with better resources for high thoughput computing. The recent splintering of the gridengine software with Oracle bringing the standard release back […]
