Latest sys-admin news

svn services changes

17 April 2011

As mentioned in centos-5-machines-upgrading-to-5-6 CentOS machines have upgraded. They now run svn 1.6.11, so the svn-1-6-6-serv service is being withdrawn.

svn has problems if used on machines with different versions, as it silently upgrades the local copy, meaning that older versions may be unable to...

CentOS 5 machines upgrading to 5.6

10 April 2011

CentOS 5 machines (mostly servers rather than user workstations) are automatically upgrading to 5.6. It should be mostly transparent, but the mailer (exim) has a security fix, so the old config file causes email to fail, including email saying that there is a problem.

Some machines may have problems...

WordPress upgraded

1 April 2011

The old WordPress software used for these pages has been upgraded. The theme has changed, but other things should be much the same.

Network outages and consequences

17 March 2011

As of about the 11th of March, we have been having a number of problems with servers crashing, machines misbehaving, network dropouts, things going slowly, etc. We believe this to be due to some sort of local networking problem with the switches. Latest update: The supervisor in use on the central switch was...

Unix groups now also available in AD

21 February 2011

All Unix groups are now also maintained as a set of Security Groups in the Active Directory. The membership is controlled from the Unix groups and additions and deletions to maintain the groups in synchronisation are performed hourly during the working day.

slogin-serv move to NFS sec=krb5

7 February 2011

Any users of the "slogin-serv" service should be aware that changes are to be made which may require them to run " kinit " to access their home directory.

Lab Linux machines are moving from using NFS with sec=sys (which trusts the client OS user information to auth users) to sec=krb5 (which requires the user to...

Web server changes

10 January 2011

Two small changes have been made to the Lab web server that may break some existing web pages, in particular those using other character encodings than UTF-8.

The first is intended to improve rendering of Lab pages in Internet Explorer 8 within the Lab. By default IE8 unhelpfully emulates old bugs when...

Network flood

2 December 2010

A traffic flood from a research group machine caused some network performance problems between sometime in the small hours of Thursday 2nd December and about 09:40 when the source was identified and disconnected. Our use of VLANs to separate traffic did a reasonable job of confining the problem, but there were...

"wgb" wireless network

19 November 2010

The "wgb" wireless network is running very slowly at the moment and is congested. The reason for this is that the ADSL connectivity that lies behind it has been capped at 128kbit/s because of excessive usage under Demon's fair usage policy. We are allowed 200GB in any rolling 30-day period, and it seems that...

Network switch failure

21 October 2010

A network switch providing connections in the north east corner of the first floor failed shortly after 04:00 this morning (2010-10-21). It is one of two switches in the wiring closet so some machines and telephones in the area would have lost all connectivity whilst others were working normally.

The...

svn services changes

CentOS 5 machines upgrading to 5.6

WordPress upgraded

Network outages and consequences

Unix groups now also available in AD

slogin-serv move to NFS sec=krb5

Web server changes

Network flood

"wgb" wireless network

Network switch failure

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