Category Archives: News

Virtual DICE – please help us test it

We’re delighted to announce Virtual DICE. It’s like a DICE desktop, but running in a virtual machine. It’s currently in a testing phase – see below. Everybody in the School of Informatics is welcome to use Virtual DICE, but you … Continue reading

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SAN Disk failure

Virtually all of Informatics storage is via our redundant Storage Array Network (SAN). All our arrays are configured as either level 1, 5 or 10 RAID. Meaning that if one of the physical hard disks fails, the data on the … Continue reading

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@inf mail problems over the 2012/13 New Year

Due to a sequence of unfortunate events, triggered by a failing power supply over the holiday period, it came to the attention of the computing staff on January 1st that external email addressed to @inf.ed.ac.uk email addresses was being rejected … Continue reading

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homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk OS upgrade to SL6.2

The homepages web service – homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk – is overdue an Operating System upgrade. It is still running the SL5.6 OS, where as DICE desktops are running at least SL6.2. The plan is to upgrade the homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk service to SL6.2 on … Continue reading

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homepages.inf and groups.inf cookie crawl

To further track down possible use of cookies within Informatics, and to make sure we comply with the current legislation *, we’ve searched the homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk file space and the groups.inf.ed.ac.uk (and similar) file space for files containing the word “cookie” … Continue reading

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Self-managed server room – ventilation and noise levels

In a previous post we mentioned that noise levels in the self-managed server room (i.e. B.Z14) of the Informatics Forum were higher than we might like. And users of that room can’t have failed to notice that it’s also been … Continue reading

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Cookies and “Similar Technologies”

As a result of a 2009 EU directive, the Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) Regulations 2003 (“PECR”) have been amended such that visitors to web sites must now give their prior consent to the placing of cookies.  The way … Continue reading

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DICE upgrade to Scientific Linux 6 (SL6)

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

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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Informatics Computing Plan 2011

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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