You can now find a summary of the responses to the Student Survey carried out last year. We found the responses very helpful in planning and prioritising some changes which include: 1. Improved documentation Our new documentation was announced recently – see http://computing.help.inf.ed.ac.uk 2. Improving awareness of services e.g. afs, openvpn, vnc, student.compute 3. Looking […]
Virtually all of Informatics storage is via our redundant Storage Array Network (SAN). All our arrays are configured as either level 1, 5 or 10 RAID. Meaning that if one of the physical hard disks fails, the data on the RAID array remains intact, allowing us to replace the failed disk without any interruption to […]
One of the outcomes from the 2012 student survey was a decision to increase the AFS home directory quotas for all users. The new limits agreed were: UG1/UG2 – 2GB UG3/UG4/PGT – 5GB Staff/PGR – 10GB Unfortunately, our policy of not overloading student partitions (that is not allocating more space for users use than the […]
The web server that hosts the groups/conferences/workshops/events.inf.ed.ac.uk web sites, and various other research sites, is long overdue an upgrade. Currently it is still running the SL5 OS, whereas virtually all other DICE computers are SL6.3. If things go to plan, the switchover date will be Thursday 24th of January at 1pm. During which time all […]
Due to a sequence of unfortunate events, triggered by a failing power supply over the holiday period, it came to the attention of the computing staff on January 1st that external email addressed to @inf.ed.ac.uk email addresses was being rejected and returned to the sender. Though it was the holiday season, this was fixed at […]
The following dates have been set for IS Network Services to perform essential replacement work on the core EdLAN network routers: Appleton Tower – Saturday 19th January 2013 08:00-10:00 (then at risk 10:00-12:00) The Appleton Tower work will cause an outage for our bridged network services in both the Forum and AT. In particular, VoIP […]
Wireless networking spectrum is a scarce resource. In the 2.4GHz band (“802.11b/g”) there are essentially only three non-overlapping channels available. Things are not quite as tight in the 5GHz band (“802.11a”), but there is by no means generous provision there either. To make matters worse, these are not dedicated WiFi bands, but are shared with […]
I’d like to draw users’ attention to the following, recently posted on one of our CO blogs: “The Research and Teaching unit recently noted that users’ crontabs (sometimes required, for example, on research servers to start or check on custom services) are not routinely backed up […] the purpose of this post is simply to […]
The 3rd minor update to ScientificLinux 6 (which is based on RHEL6) is now ready for deployment to the Informatics SL6 DICE office 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 soon as they […]
Some users have been noting errors “Another device on the network is using your computer’s IP address” and our network monitoring has detected a number of flip-flops involving Apple kit trying to use the same IP address. The culprit seems to be Apple’s ‘Internet Sharing’ software which causes a machine to use addresses which have […]
