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There has been a unpublished local feature of the mailman lists service running on https://lists.inf.ed.ac.uk which has changed.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 […]
We will be upgrading the Informatics XRDP Remote Desktop (remote.inf) cluster from Ubuntu Focal to Jammy on Thursday this week (14th September). The work will begin at approximately 09:00 and we expect the service to be unavailable for several hours. Whilst the service is unavailable those users with DICE desktops can access that via RDP […]
What you need to know In the next few weeks quite a few Informatics web servers – and other computing services – will be shut down for a short time. Most of them will go down for only a few minutes, but a few servers will have to be down for an hour or two. […]
It’s that time of year again! We need to reboot our network switches to apply some firmware upgrades, and also to reset their uptime counters before they overflow. We’re planning to do these reboots in the evenings over the next few days, so you may notice some small downtime while your edge switch reboots. There […]
