authenticator.cc is a handy way to generate MFA codes – those numbers that are sometimes demanded by Microsoft online services such as Teams, email and SharePoint. It’s a web browser extension, and it works with Firefox, Google Chrome, or Microsoft Edge. It gives you a button on your browser which, when you click it, generates […]
As of today, 29/03/2024, the blog service is now running on Ubuntu Jammy and has been updated to the latest version of WordPress (6.4). The biggest difference is the editor used for pages and posts, but the previous editor can be enabled via the “Classic Editor” plugin. If you notice any blog posts have disappeared […]
The computing team has been reviewing the services it provides to the School in order to identify and withdraw support for those services which are no longer seeing significant usage, can be replicated by a centrally provided service, or present a significant maintenance challenge. Originally introduced in 2007, iFriend has provided a means for users […]
In preparation to replace the existing www.ed.ac.uk/informatics/ pages with new web pages hosted at (www.)informatics.ed.ac.uk, the DNS entries informatics.ed.ac.uk and www.informatics.ed.ac.uk have changed to point at the IS (Information Services) web hosting service, rather than our own server. It was accepted that this may break any old existing www.informatics.ed.ac.uk URLs (which has been deprecated for […]
blog.inf content being cloned
On Tuesday 12th of December 2023 Informations Services (IS) enabled the “SafeLink” feature of the Office 365* mail service. This doesn’t seem to have been very well announced, and came as a surprise even to the Informatics computing staff. The basics are now that when a mail is delivered into your Office 365 mailbox, any […]
You can now find them at https://mastodon.social/@infalerts We occasionally post systems alerts when network or computing facilities suffer an outage which seems bad enough to stop people from reaching University or School of Informatics systems. Previously we used a Twitter account for that, but since those accounts are no longer reliably visible to people who aren’t […]
We’re pleased to announce a new version of Virtual DICE for 2023–24. Here’s how to download it. What’s Virtual DICE? The managed Linux machines here in the School of Informatics run an environment which we call DICE. It’s based on Ubuntu Linux. We use DICE on desktop computers and on servers, but there’s also a […]
(Now updated to mention otpclient.) As you may know, the University is introducing MFA, or Multi-Factor Authentication. It’s doing this to increase security, to protect us from increasingly severe online threats. At the moment MFA is specifically for Microsoft services – Teams, email, SharePoint, Office 365, and so on. What is MFA? In practice what […]
There has been a unpublished local feature of the mailman lists service running on https://lists.inf.ed.ac.uk which has changed. The short version is that if you used to deliberately use the URL https://lists.inf.ed.ac.uk/mailman/… to log you into list, you should now use https://auth.lists.inf.ed.ac.uk/mailman/… Now a bit more detail and history. The original web interface to the […]
