All University-owned desktops and laptops - including self-managed - should be encrypted.
The disks on University-managed Windows and Macs are encrypted.
For DICE desktops see Encrypting Groups of Files on DICE. Some DICE disk partitions are encrypted, and the computing staff are working on encryption solutions for the others.
VPN stands for Virtual Private Network. It's a private connection between your computer - wherever it is - and a computer somewhere else. It's private because it's strongly encrypted, so it can't be read en route.
The University of Edinburgh has a VPN. When you use it, your computer has a private connection to the University's network. To other computers, your computer appears to be on that network.
You should use the University VPN whenever you are working while away from the University, for security.
evince is the default PDF viewer on DICE.
Annotation works on Ubuntu but is not supported on SL7.
For full guidance on how to use evince, see:
google-chrome displays PDF well.
A window manager controls the placement and appearance of windows on your screen.
When using the ⇒ DICE remote desktop you use a window manager called MATE. This can't be changed. But when you use a DICE computer directly - actually sitting in front of one - you have a choice of window managers.
How to try another window manager once
You may get this error from the ssh command:
kex_exchange_identification: read: Connection reset by peer
Or it might look like this:
ssh_exchange_identification: read: Connection reset by peer
These are the most likely reasons for the error:
The Google Play Store for Android devices (largely tablets and phones) offers a massive choice of SSH apps which provide an SSH client and terminal emulator combined, allowing your device to login to Informatics machines. Popular ones include JuiceSSH, Termius and ConnectBot but there are dozens available, many for free.
If you work from home, you might find that your ssh sessions to the Informatics ssh servers unexpectedly time out. If so, the problem is almost certainly being caused by your home NAT router timing out what it considers to be an 'inactive' session.
The solution is to use 'ssh keepalives' - to configure your ssh client to automatically send some 'no-op' protocol codes to the server every now and again, in order that the NAT router considers the session to be active.
How to configure this will vary from OS to OS.
The "Informatics-InfNets-Forum" and "Informatics-EdLAN-Forum" configuration files and the corresponding -AT versions tunnel only Informatics traffic and EdLAN traffic respectively, leaving all your other traffic to go out through your ISP's default route.
We normally recommend those, as they're generally more efficient and robust, but they do have the potential issue that traffic to other sites will have your ISP-provided address, and so anyone basing authorization decisions on that address won't see you as being a University person. "Informatics-AllNets-Forum" (and ...-AT) is provided as a workaround for that situation. It tunnels all traffic over the OpenVPN tunnel, and so to the outside it appears that you have an EdLAN address. Unfortunately that does have some side-effects.
We can only really provide support for the most recent version of Virtual DICE. When a new version comes out, users of Virtual DICE should switch to it - being careful to rescue any files from their old VM before deleting it.
Remember that Virtual DICE is intended for fairly simple tasks. If you find yourself needing to make complex changes to it in order to support your work, please focus on DICE rather than Virtual DICE, and please ask ⇒ Computing Support for help.
If you're having trouble with Virtual DICE, these suggestions may help.
When you install it, the screen resolution in Virtual DICE is set to 800x600. To increase that: