Category Archives: Uncategorized

Our emergency computing systems alerts have moved

You can now find them at https://mastodon.social/@infalerts We occasionally post systems alerts when network or computing facilities suffer an outage which seems bad enough to stop people from reaching University or School of Informatics systems. Previously we used a Twitter account … Continue reading

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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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Remote desktop service upgrade

We will be upgrading the Informatics XRDP Remote Desktop (remote.inf) cluster from Ubuntu Focal to Jammy on Thursday this week (14th September). The work will begin at approximately 09:00 and we expect the service to be unavailable for several hours. … 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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Network infrastructure reboots

It’s that time of year again! We need to reboot our network switches to apply some firmware upgrades, and also to reset their uptime counters before they overflow. We’re planning to do these reboots in the evenings over the next … Continue reading

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EdLAN replacement: next steps

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 … Continue reading

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Beware phishing emails

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 … Continue reading

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Singularity container platform on DICE.

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. … Continue reading

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Network changes for self-managed machines

As you’ll all be aware, the University is tightening up on network security in response to outside threats.    Within Informatics we have also been looking at ways to improve our security, and one area we have identified is that of … Continue reading

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