Normally in a networked Linux environment, user information - phone numbers, email addresses, office locations - can be searched using commands like finger and getent. These don't work on DICE (this blog article explains why) but there are alternative commands:
finger-dice is a wrapper utility around the system finger command and can be used to find out details about users given only part of their name (e.g. surname).
Recently, we have seen a big increase in the number of Network Attached Storage (NAS) appliances being bought by research projects within the School of Informatics. The attraction is easy to see: at face value, they offer considerably cheaper storage than any of the other storage options available (for a rundown of these options, see Data storage options). But before going for the cheap and cheerful approach, there are a number of factors you should consider.
On DICE desktops, the Firefox web browser can periodically lose its bookmarks.
In most cases it seems to be related to leaving Firefox running over night, and then your AFS tokens expiring. The only way to make sure this doesn't happen is to remember to close Firefox each night.
If you have lost your bookmarks, or they've been corrupted, then this document hopes to give you some tips on how you may be able to recover them.
This is the help page for the AFS backed Git service in the School of Informatics.
The School of Informatics is now offering a simple Git service which uses AFS ACLs to manage access to the repository. This document details how to set up a repository on this new service and set the access permission for it.
Git is a distributed version control system, originally developed by Linus Torvalds as a Linux kernel development tool.
The sweb web service is an alternative to homepages and group web space, but with better security and privacy. This page explains how to configure and use it.
This document describes how to install and configure the latest version of OpenAFS for Windows, thus allowing access to Informatics AFS file space from any Windows machine. This procedure has been tested using Windows 8 64bit, Windows 10 64bit and Windows 11 64bit but should be applicable to other versions of Windows.
We are recommending you use the version of OpenAFS as packaged by AuriStor (formerly Your-File-System, which is why you may see references to YFS).
All AFS home directories (and some group areas) contain a Yesterday sub-directory. This directory contains a copy of your home directory from "Yesterday", which can be useful if you accidentally delete a file. Yesterday does not take up any of your disk quota.