Author Archives: Alastair Scobie

Flood in the server room (not for real!)

Periodically, we test our preparedness for disasters by holding a mock disaster exercise. On 27th February, the computing staff were told that part of the roof of the Forum server room had collapsed due to flood damage and that this … Continue reading

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Spending of Computing Budget in 2010/2011

Some of you may be interested in how we have spent the Computing budget for 2010/2011. If you have any questions, please ask. Capital Expenditure Desktops (£90,000) – replacing 170 elderly and unreliable desktops and adding an additional 24 desktops … Continue reading

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SL6 64 bit

As announced a couple of months back, we shall shortly be upgrading DICE desktops to Scientific Linux 6 (SL6), starting with the teaching labs. We propose to take this opportunity to switch the default architecture from 32bit to 64bit. SL6 … Continue reading

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Downtime of some web services

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 … Continue reading

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DICE upgrade to Scientific Linux 6 (SL6)

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 … Continue reading

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Informatics Computing Plan 2011

The Informatics Computing Plan for 2011 is now available. This plan reviews progress with respect to the previous plan for 2010, enumerates our key aims for 2011 and makes a stab at identifying likely aims for 2012. Comments are very … Continue reading

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Computing project proposals for Jan-Apr 2011 – Invitation

Development of new computing services by the computing staff is now scheduled in project periods (three per year). The next project period starts in January 2011 and the process of prioritising which projects will be resourced starts now (end Nov). … Continue reading

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Buying IT equipment

With the recent increased scrutiny of public sector expenditure, it is more important than ever that we follow correct procedures for purchasing IT equipment. The following link outlines how we should go about purchasing IT equipment :- http://www.inf.ed.ac.uk/systems/procurement/

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Welcome

Welcome to the Informatics Computing Staff blog….

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