Author Archives: Craig Strachan

NAS Appliances in the School of Informatics

Over the last couple of years, we have noticed that more and more of you are buying NAS appliances, boxes containing a number of commodity disks which can be attached to the network and serve that disk space to other … Continue reading

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Git in the School of Informatics

Git is a version control system which has become very popular within Informatics. In fact it has become so popular that we are now offering no less that three different Git related services within the School! At this point, if … Continue reading

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Informatics and the CSE Data Security Plan

As you were reading Johanna’s email last month on the encryption of personal computing devices, you may have noticed that this advice is but one part of a College of Science and Engineering action plan on data security (this plan … Continue reading

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Automounter Changes

One of the consequences of the move from SL6 to SL7 is that we have switched from using the AMD automounter (which isn’t available on SL7) to Autofs. In making this switch, we have taken the opportunity to clear out … Continue reading

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Changes to Forum Printing

Currently the Forum print rooms located in the North East corner of the building have both a Xerox Multi-function device capable of printing in colour and a small monochrome printer. These mono printers are very old now and becoming more … Continue reading

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New Tape Library

Magnetic tape is viewed as a somewhat outdated medium by many people these days but for backing up larges amounts of data over a long period of time (and Informatics has a lot of data to back up), it still … Continue reading

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Mobile Friendly Informatics Survey Results

A big thank you to all of you who took the time to complete the recent survey on the areas of the Informatics Computing Service where mobile (mobile in this context meaning a smartphone or tablet rather than a conventional … Continue reading

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Security upgrades to OpenAFS

OpenAFS’s inability to use any encryption type other than single DES in the Kerberos tickets used to authenticate server-server and client-server communications has long been recognised as a major security shortcoming. 1DES’s relatively small key space renders it highly susceptible … Continue reading

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New AFS Quotas

One of the outcomes from the 2012 student survey was a decision to increase the AFS home directory quotas for all users. The new limits agreed were: UG1/UG2 – 2GB UG3/UG4/PGT – 5GB Staff/PGR – 10GB Unfortunately, our policy of … Continue reading

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Backing Up Macs

The question has been raised recently of how best to back Mac computers in use within the School. Macs running a reasonably modern version of MacOS come with Time Machine which allows the Mac owner to easily back up and … Continue reading

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