With the DICE SL6 upgrade we will be formally decommissioning the schools two Condor pools over this summer. Condor is a system for stealing unused cpu cycles from distributed commodity computers for use as a High Throughput Computing platform. For some years we have been running condor on all the lab machines and a number […]
We have recently measured the average noise levels in the ‘self-managed server room’ (i.e. B.Z14) of the Informatics Forum. The noise levels are not excessive, and they don’t present any Health & Safety issues given our expected working practices – but they are higher than we might like, and some people might find them uncomfortable. […]
I’m pleased to be able to announce the availability of a much requested backup service for self-managed machines running most varieties of Linux/Unix, Windows (XP, Vista and 7) and Mac-OS. Full details of how to start using the service can be found at https://wiki.inf.ed.ac.uk/view/DICE/ServicesUnitInstallingTibsClient. This service uses the same software, hardware and backup intervals as […]
The weekly update to DICE which went out yesterday (Wednesday 4th May 2011) saw the introduction of VirtualBox version 4.0.4 to replace, the now rather ancient, versions 3.1 and 3.2. If you are using an SL5 or SL6 based desktop machine then this new version will be automatically installed the next time the machine is […]
One of our VMware host servers has dropped off the network twice this week for no apparent reason. We are going to reboot the server (and its virtual servers) at 8am on Friday 29th April to see if this fixes the problem. The affected services are :- OpenConf service ISS RT Seacliffe (Qualnet licence server) […]
A bit belatedly we discovered that our two running Plone services were potentially vulnerable to an escalation of privileges exploit. Looking through the logs with the checker they provided, and the fact that we use Cosign authentication for most of our sites, seems to say that our sites have not been compromised in this way. […]
There was a brief interruption to Institute websites this morning (10:34-10:40). This followed the creation of a new Plone website, and was due to a race condition in the automatic configuration process that stopped the web server daemon from restarting. It appears that apache tried to restart before the cosign configuration process had created a […]
This is an early warning that we shall be upgrading DICE desktops to Scientific Linux 6 (SL6) this summer/autumn. SL6, which is based on Redhat’s Enterprise Linux 6, is very similar to Fedora 13 on which our current DICE desktop platform is based. However, support for Fedora 13 is about to be withdrawn – Fedora […]
Due to a couple of incidents at the weekend, where two of our web servers were made inaccessible due to either accidental or malicious activity, we are now denying access from IP addresses attempting lots of simultaneous web connections. Once a single IP attempts an additional connection above a certain threshold, those subsequent connections will […]
We often get asked to install Dropbox on DICE, it hasn’t happened before now, mostly for reasons that are probably too long and boring to go into on the systems blog (but if you’re interested). However if you have hand crafted an install on DICE or are using it you may want to be aware […]
