It’s now very nearly five years since we moved into the Forum (time flies…), and in common with all our other computing equipment we now need to refresh the building’s network switches. Rather than do the whole lot in one go, which would have had unfortunate effects on the remainder of the School’s equipment budget, […]
In order to make the process of searching for particular software packages slightly easier, there is now a web page available at: http://pkgsearch.inf.ed.ac.uk …which will allow you to search our local repositories using a single keyword or RPM string, with the option of tailoring the search to a specific software group, for 32- & 64-bit […]
In order to maintain the integrity of our systems we need to reboot all DICE desktops over the next few days. We understand that reboots can be very inconvenient so you can be assured that we will only ever schedule reboots which we consider to be essential. A delayed reboot has been scheduled for all […]
If you normally stay logged in to DICE overnight, read on. From Wednesday night (29 May) DICE desktops will be more likely to fall asleep. For some years our DICE desktops have slept when nobody was logged in and the computer seemed idle. From Wednesday they’ll also fall asleep even if a login session is […]
It’s now easier to see whether or not your account has been compromised. As part of our ongoing work to enhance the security of the computing infrastructure within the School of Informatics we have developed a new web interface which allows users to review their recent login activity. The site is accessible at: https://cabin.inf.ed.ac.uk/authview/ This […]
We want to save energy, so we try to ensure that DICE computers sleep when idle. The graph below shows how many DICE desktops were asleep during each hour of a recent week. It was produced by David Sterratt, and I’d like to thank him for his work on it and for his interest in […]
A number of users of our self-managed “DHCP” subnet experienced problems accessing the network starting some time on Saturday 20th up until 14:45 on Monday 22nd. We believe that this was caused by a rogue DHCP server, and that disabling its network access restored the service for everyone else. Please be careful when adding devices […]
On Tuesday 16th April we plan to replace the SSH server named “dunlin” which hosts student.ssh.inf.ed.ac.uk and ssh.inf.ed.ac.uk with a machine named “kubelik”. 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 […]
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 […]
