Author Archives: Chris Cooke

About Chris Cooke

Chris Cooke is a Computing Officer in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. He works in the Systems Unit and rides a very large bicycle.

Virtual DICE is now available

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 … Continue reading

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MFA is coming

(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 … Continue reading

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Brief shutdowns of Informatics services

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 … Continue reading

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New student compute servers

Sometimes you need to run software which needs a lot of oomph behind it, and which can take days to run. It’s a bit impractical to run that sort of thing on a normal desktop – which is why Informatics … Continue reading

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A second student compute server

We’ve added a second student compute server, and it’s called student2.compute.inf.ed.ac.uk. Students can login to it like this: ssh student2.compute.inf.ed.ac.uk We’ve done this because in recent days the student compute server (student.compute.inf.ed.ac.uk) has been unresponsive at times, because it’s been … Continue reading

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Virtual DICE for 2021-22

The 2021-22 version of Virtual DICE is now available. Virtual DICE is like the School of Informatics’ DICE Linux environment, except that you can run it on your own computer in a virtual machine. If your computer can run VirtualBox, … Continue reading

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Login Problems

Are you having problems logging in? Use your username When you login to a DICE Linux computer, use your DICE username. That username is the same as your University Username (“UUN” for short). For students it’s the letter “s” followed … Continue reading

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How to avoid the remote.inf.ed.ac.uk downtime

Updated (26/08/21): this work is complete. This is about downtime for the remote desktop service, and how you can carry on using the service while your usual server is not available. What’s remote.inf.ed.ac.uk? The remote desktop service gives you a … Continue reading

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Remote desktop now needs the VPN

To use our remote desktop service, or any RDP connection to a computer at Edinburgh University, you must now (edit: from 07:00 on Wednesday 28 April) use a University VPN. If you don’t, you won’t get a connection. If you … Continue reading

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*.remote.inf.ed.ac.uk change

We’re changing the *.remote.inf.ed.ac.uk Remote Desktop service to remove some of the machines. However, everybody will still be able to use the service as before. Back in the spring, we made ten machines available for remote desktop sessions under the … Continue reading

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