Monthly Archives: April 2011

Downtime of some web services

Posted on April 28, 2011 by Alastair Scobie

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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Plone Security Update

Posted on April 27, 2011 by neilb

A bit belatedly we discovered that our two running Plone services were potentially vulnerable to an escalation of privileges exploit. Looking through the logs with the checker they provided, and the fact that we use Cosign authentication for most of … Continue reading →

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Unscheduled interruption to Institute websites (around 10:35am, 26.Apr)

Posted on April 26, 2011 by roger

There was a brief interruption to Institute websites this morning (10:34-10:40). This followed the creation of a new Plone website, and was due to a race condition in the automatic configuration process that stopped the web server daemon from restarting. … Continue reading →

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DICE upgrade to Scientific Linux 6 (SL6)

Posted on April 21, 2011 by Alastair Scobie

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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Web server connection limits

Posted on April 15, 2011 by neilb

Due to a couple of incidents at the weekend, where two of our web servers were made inaccessible due to either accidental or malicious activity, we are now denying access from IP addresses attempting lots of simultaneous web connections. Once … Continue reading →

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Is there a hole in your Dropbox?

Posted on April 13, 2011 by iainr

We often get asked to install Dropbox on DICE, it hasn’t happened before now, mostly for reasons that are probably too long and boring to go into on the systems blog (but if you’re interested). However if you have hand … Continue reading →

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staff.ssh problems

Posted on April 13, 2011 by squinney

The machine hosting the staff.ssh service (rydell) crashed on the evening of Tuesday 12th April. This was caused by a runaway process which consumed all available memory. The machine was rebooted at 6:30am on Wednesday 13th April and is now … Continue reading →

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Informatics Computing Plan 2011

Posted on April 11, 2011 by Alastair Scobie

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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Thursday is Software Day

Posted on April 6, 2011 by Chris Cooke

Here’s some news: we’ve moved the DICE weekly release from Thursday to Wednesday afternoons. If you’re already tempted to move on, let me explain. Most of the configuration of a DICE machine – what software is installed, who can login, … Continue reading →

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ssh’ing onward from cvs/svn.inf.ed.ac.uk blocked

Posted on April 5, 2011 by neilb

As a security measure we are now blocking outbound ssh connections from the cvs and subversion server cvs/svn.inf.ed.ac.uk. There should be no need for users to be ssh’ing from cvs.inf and so no one should notice any change in behaviour. … Continue reading →

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