This article describes Prometheus, the account management system developed within Informatics (note that the choice of name comes from this Prometheus, and predates the recent film). More accurately, Prometheus could be described as an entity management system, as it manages machine details (and other things), as well as people. This article will only discuss the […]
As many users will have noticed, the Informatics SSH server ‘dunlin’ was unavailable from the morning of Thursday 26th July until the afternoon of Tuesday 31st July. This was because the root account on the system was compromised and an attempt was made to insert a rootkit into the kernel. The configuration of this system […]
The question has been raised recently of how best to back Mac computers in use within the School. Macs running a reasonably modern version of MacOS come with Time Machine which allows the Mac owner to easily back up and restore from an external disk and we would suggest that this should be the first […]
Keen observers of University affairs will already be aware that the University has recently changed its supplier of MFDs (a MFD (Multi Function Device) is what used to be called, in simpler times, a photocopier with a number of additional functions such as printing, scanning and faxing). As a result, Canon and OCE photocopiers in […]
The Mac is not immune to viruses, Trojans, backdoors, adware, spyware and other unwanted applications. In reality, the Mac OS, its included applications, and third-party applications have and will continue to have security issues that can allow some form of attack. Anti-virus programs don’t just provide protection against known viruses; they also include anti-phishing, anti-adware, […]
Many of the Institute and commodity servers have local partitions that are sometimes used to store data. These partitions are usually called /disk/data or /disk/scratch. In total, there is more than 7Tb of data on such disks! These locations are primarily intended for temporary data or data that can easily be regenerated. We are, however, […]
For some time now, we have been thinking about the form the Informatics Web presence should take in the future. From this, an Informatics web strategy has evolved, the highlights of which I’d like to cover in this post. The strategy itself can be found here. The main points of the strategy are: The majority […]
To further track down possible use of cookies within Informatics, and to make sure we comply with the current legislation *, we’ve searched the homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk file space and the groups.inf.ed.ac.uk (and similar) file space for files containing the word “cookie” and “google-analytics.com/ga.js”. The latter being an example of something that generates “first party” cookies. Below […]
Below is a post from Information Services, warning about website hacking incidents that have happened recently within the University. If you are responsible for a website, or even just web pages, but particularily if you use a self run blog/wiki/WCMS, then it is a good idea to follow the advice given below and periodically Google […]
For many years, the School of Informatics has provided Windows and MacOS users with access to its file and printing resources via Samba. Since the introduction of the OpenAFS file system and the CUPS printing system, there have been better methods available for accessing these resources. Given this, the intention has always been to withdraw […]
