The School storage is continuously increasing and datasets of many terrabytes are no longer exceptional. One of the big problems with large datasets is how to transfer them from one system to another. One of our research groups collects micro tomography datasets of the order of tens of terrabytes. These need to be transferred from […]

So you are writing scientific software and are wondering how to tell the world about it. In this blog post I briefly list the things you can do to make your software more visible. Use version control to manage your code. These days that is probably git. Depending on complexity of your project, version control […]

CephFS is now an integral part of the School of GeoScience’s IT infrastructure. It provides both personal and group storage for windows, mac and linux users. Since our first disaster due to running out of resources it has been running very reliably and it provided all the benefits we had hoped for. Until disaster stuck […]

We all make mistakes. But they are quite often invisible. Especially when we are programming. Once we know that we have made a mistake we tend to fix it and move on to the next problem. Mistakes are a learning opportunity. Sharing them thus helps others. The Software Sustainability Institute is running a campaign to […]

Conda is the name of the package manager used with the data science distribution anaconda. It is available for Linux, Windows and Mac systems and is heavily used for managing scientific software environments. In the past we required our users to download and install conda themselves. Earlier versions of conda would modify the user’s environment […]

The University of Edinburgh is piloting multifactor authentication for Office 365. This works with the GNOME evolution mail/calendar application and the EWS plugin. In evolution create a new mail account of type Exchange Web Services and username: UUN@ed.ac.uk host URL: https://outlook.office365.com/EWS/Exchange.asmx select OAuth2 from the Authentication types tick the Override Office365 OAuth2 settings check box […]

In one of my previous posts I outlined the ceph setup used in the School of GeoSciences. In this post, I would like to describe how the various bits fit together in some more detail. The diagram above shows a simplified version of our computing setup. Broadly speaking we distinguish between computers in the college […]

We had the opportunity to try out a cold start of all our servers located in the College Server Room on the weekend. We shut down all machines on Friday 11th June to allow contractors to work on the electricity supply on Saturday. From my perspective the most interesting aspect was shutting down the ceph […]

Now that our CephFS file store is in production and LCFG managed Ubuntu is available I began to experiment with running Samba on Ubuntu. The good news is that the LCFG samba component pretty much worked out of the box. The minor tweak that was required is going through the Informatics release process. Our test […]

Yesterday, I attended the ceph science meeting. I noticed the meeting was advertised on the ceph user mailing list and decided to go along to see what it is about. Ceph sysadmins from various institutions across the world attended to exchange information and discuss issues arising with scientific workloads. The meeting was very interesting. Our […]