Author Archives: toby

As a measure to increase the overall security of our systems, we will shortly be introducing a policy where DICE accounts are suspended if they are inactive for 180 days. Please see here for details: http://computing.help.inf.ed.ac.uk/account-inactivity-suspension If you have any … Continue reading →

Users of DICE machines may have noticed that system utilities such as getent and finger are no longer returning a full list of Informatics users. We use sssd (System Security Service Daemon) on DICE to cache LDAP data, such as … Continue reading →

We have introduced a new password policy for DICE accounts: http://computing.help.inf.ed.ac.uk/password-policy The significant changes made to the previous policy are: We now have a more flexible approach to the number of character classes required in any password – specifically that … Continue reading →

We have recently implemented automated processing of the final stages of a user account’s lifecycle within our account management system, ‘Prometheus’. [1] This is used to apply expiry (or ‘grace’) and suspension periods to an account, as described in our … Continue reading →

This article describes Prometheus, the account management system developed within Informatics (note that the choice of name comes from this Prometheus, and predates the recent film). More accurately, Prometheus could be described as an entity management system, as it manages … Continue reading →