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 […]
The blogs currently available on blog.inf – which has been not-a-service since its inception in 2009 – have moved to a new host, running the latest version of WordPress. This is now a supported service. The upgrade and transfer process has obviously preserved all blog posts, comments, and uploaded files. However, there are probably a […]
The homepages web service – homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk – is overdue an Operating System upgrade. It is still running the SL5.6 OS, where as DICE desktops are running at least SL6.2. The plan is to upgrade the homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk service to SL6.2 on the morning of Sunday 7th October. The switch over will only cause a break in […]
New versions of network switch firmware often bring additional facilities along with bug-fixes. We have recently been evaluating some security and robustness enhancements, with a view to rolling them out across the Informatics network. In particular: DHCP protection, which will prevent rogue machines purporting to be DHCP servers on the self-managed subnets. We occasionally see […]
In order to improve the security of the DICE computing infrastructure we have decided to disable support for the SSH version 1 protocol. This is a very old protocol which is now considered to be obsolete. Due to a number of design flaws it is known to be insecure and is vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks. […]
