Author Archives: neilb

About neilb

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

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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Access to ifile.inf.ed.ac.uk restricted

Access to the ifile.inf.ed.ac.uk service has been restricted to the University (and therefor also the Informatics) networks. Previously you could directly access ifile.inf.ed.ac.uk from anywhere, but now if you are at home, for example, you will first need to connect … Continue reading

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Printing changes reminder

Back in November 2020 we announced a change to the cloud printing service at Informatics. Unsurprisingly this was probably of little interest to most people as they worked from home during lockdown. Now that people are returning to the Informatics … Continue reading

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DMARC change to mailman lists

DMARC is a technology designed to combat forged email coming from senders other than those who are entitled to send as a particular domain. Unfortunately there are times where you may want to legitimately “forge” the sender address of an … Continue reading

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Shut down of Informatics servers at KB

To improve the resilience of the services hosted in the JCMB server room, a new Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) is being installed to cover the whole room. Unfortunately this work needs the power to be switched off for a period … Continue reading

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