Within the Informatics Forum, connections to the wired network are made via network ports which are arranged in sets of six in the various floorboxes situated in both offices and public space. Each user's desk is generally fed from a single floorbox.
To avoid confusion, we configure all floorboxes which feed desks to the following standard pattern with 'port 1' being the lowest-numbered in the box, and 'port 6' the highest:
The School of Informatics has some 40 or so different IP subnets in use.
Each of these subnets serves a particular purpose but, for users in the Informatics Forum, the five most important subnets are:
PuTTY is both an ssh client and a terminal emulator. You can use it to remotely login to Informatics machines using ssh. See also: using ssh from Windows.
You can log in using your DICE password ("keyboard-interactive"), or use Kerberos if you have that installed and configured (for example, if you've configured your machine for AFS).
Instructions on configuring PuTTY for Kerberos are below.
An important aim of the Informatics computing infrastructure is that you should be able to easily and securely use your data, and make use of computing resources, from outside of the School's internal network. To do this, you need to have certain software packages installed on your home computer. Although there are pages on this site telling you how to install this software, they don't necessarily explain what each piece of software does, why you might need them, and how they interact. This page tries to fill that gap.
Now on the Informatics Computing Hub (University users only).
We run a local NTP time-synchronisation service for Informatics, and recommend that self-managed machines on our network are set up to use it rather than remote timeservers. There are four machines - ntp0.inf.ed.ac.uk, ntp1.inf.ed.ac.uk, ntp2.inf.ed.ac.uk, and ntp3.inf.ed.ac.uk For robustness you should configure your machine to synchronise to as many of these as your system will allow.
Use ssh to from your Mac to Informatics hosts. We recommend that you use Kerberos with ssh as it makes it more secure.
Most Linux distributions have an SSH client installed by default. For Fedora and Redhat it is in the openssh-clients package; on Debian and Ubuntu it is in the openssh-client package.
Before you can ssh to Informatics, you must be using a VPN - either the University VPN or the School's OpenVPN. The VPN page can help with that.
Then, to access an Informatics SSH server, start a terminal, and enter something like the following (replacing 'yourusername' with your DICE Informatics username):
If you are using Windows 10 or 11, we recommend you use the built-in ssh client. It can be used from either the Command Prompt or Windows PowerShell applications. It's based on OpenSSH, so you can manage your ssh keys in the same way as on Linux (for details see Using ssh on Linux).
This page is about the three SSH gateways into the School of Informatics, which are: