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There has been a unpublished local feature of the mailman lists service running on https://lists.inf.ed.ac.uk which has changed.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 […]
Back in January 2022 the University intended to set a default DMARC policy for all sub-domains to be “sp=reject”. As inf.ed.ac.uk is a sub-domain that would have affected us, and so we set it to “none” while we considered the implications. Though the University has still not made its change, we are now going to […]
The ifile service has had a good run, but it’s based on old software that uses an unsupported framework. Analysis shows that it’s rarely used, so to free up resources we’ve decided to retire it. We’ve contacted the users that use the service the most to warn of the impending closure. We plan to shut […]
The hardware that hosts the homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk web service is rather old in the tooth. A new machine is ready to take over, and I plan to do this on Tuesday 6th of March at 10am. There should only be a brief break in service of less than a minute, but the service should be considered […]
You may soon lose access to your University email if you use an old or unmaintained email client. Even if you don’t, you may need to make changes. Microsoft has announced that to improve security, it is changing the way email clients can authenticate to the University email server. This may result in some older […]
