To get a self-managed computer on to the wired network in Appleton Tower, please fill in a Support Request. In your message, please include the computer's MAC address, its serial number and its host name. The Computing Support team will tell you when you can connect it to a network port.
A 'self-managed' computer is one that is not managed by the School - so that's anything other than DICE Linux, Windows Managed Desktop, or Managed Mac.
In addition to our overall computing Policies and guidelines:
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.
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:
We run a complete domain name service (DNS) which assigns a permanent fully-qualified domain name (FQDN) (*) in the .inf.ed.ac.uk domain to any machine on our network which has been assigned a fixed IP address. We do not run a dynamic DNS service, so we cannot give a permanent FQDN to any machine which is using a dynamically-assigned IP address.
We run a 'resolver' at each site, for the benefit of self-managed machines. The address(es) for this service will be configured by DHCP as appropriate.
This page is about encrypting groups of files on DICE Linux. For other computers and devices see Enabling encryption on computers.
There are at least two tools available for encrypting groups of files under DICE: