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 […]
The project to replace EdLAN reached another milestone recently, with the completion of the migration of all subnets away from the old EdLAN core routers across to the new EdLAN distribution routers. There’s now some tidying-up to be done, and the parts which might affect us in Informatics are scheduled for Tuesday 23rd. Specifically, some […]
Please be aware of a current wave of phishing emails which purport to be voicemails with subjects such as “Voicemail (48 secs)”. These are scams designed to trick you into supplying various login and personal details, they are being sent from compromised accounts, which is why they look real. Please do not open these emails, […]
Singularity container platform is now available on Ubuntu DICE. Singularity is a container platform, perhaps the most well-supported Docker alternative. It allows you to run containers that package up pieces of software in a way that is portable and reproducible. You can build or download pre-built images from external resources (including Docker Hub) and run […]
The University is increasingly concerned about the security of our computing services, and as such is moving vulnerable services behind the University firewall or simply shutting them down altogether. With the closure of staffmail and everyone now using Office 365, our authenticated smtp.inf.ed.ac.uk service is a service with relatively little use, is world accessible, and […]
When the School of Informatics was first formed, existing individual department services were kept running. One of those services was ftp.cogsci.ed.ac.uk. However over the years its functionality became less and less, and currently only allows public downloads of content that has not been updated in 10 years. Looking at the logs the vast majority of […]
To improve the security of our HTTPS web sites, we have removed support for older/less secure cipher suites, particularly those susceptible to the SWEET32 attack. This should not impact any current web browsers, but old devices, eg old android mobile phones may find they can no longer connect to our HTTP websites. Neil
