Author Archives: neilb

About neilb

Computing staff at the University of Edinburgh. Part of the Services Unit.

informatics.ed.ac.uk change

In preparation to replace the existing www.ed.ac.uk/informatics/ pages with new web pages hosted at (www.)informatics.ed.ac.uk, the DNS entries informatics.ed.ac.uk and www.informatics.ed.ac.uk have changed to point at the IS (Information Services) web hosting service, rather than our own server. It was … Continue reading

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blog.inf.ed.ac.uk being proxied

blog.inf content being cloned Continue reading

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Microsoft Safelinks

On Tuesday 12th of December 2023 Informations Services (IS) enabled the “SafeLink” feature of the Office 365* mail service. This doesn’t seem to have been very well announced, and came as a surprise even to the Informatics computing staff. The … Continue reading

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Changes to https://lists.inf.ed.ac.uk/

There has been a unpublished local feature of the mailman lists service running on https://lists.inf.ed.ac.uk which has changed.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 … Continue reading

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Changes to inf.ed.ac.uk DMARC policy

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 … Continue reading

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homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk move

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 … Continue reading

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Changes to smtp.inf.ed.ac.uk

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, … Continue reading

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Closure of ftp.cogsci.ed.ac.uk

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 … Continue reading

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Removing support for older SSL cipher suites

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 … Continue reading

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Changes to University DMARC record

To make it harder for spammers and scammers to forge email claiming to originate from the ed.ac.uk domain, the University will shortly be changing the DMARC sub-domain policy (sp argument) to “reject”. This change will tell any mail services that … Continue reading

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