Dealing with spam
The University has advice on phishing messages and email scams.
Spam is unwanted, unsolicited and junk email. Often it contains offensive material or scams. Action is taken at University level to reduce the level of spam that gets to your mailbox, but it is a never ending battle.
Authenticated SMTP
Background
As an anti-spam measure, the Informatics mail servers do not allow normal mail connections from outside ed.ac.uk. Unfortunately, this also stops legitimate Informatics staff and students from sending mail from their home machines (or laptops or mobiles) via our mail relays. One solution was to use the IS VPN service or the user's local ISP mailrelay, but this required the user to reconfigure machines/email clients just to send mail.
PostgreSQL teaching and research databases
PostgreSQL is a database technology, and we deploy several fully-managed PostgreSQL services. This page explains our PostgreSQL software, accounts, extensions and using the database with your own code. To find out more, click one of those keywords. If you are a member of computing staff you might wish to look at the PostgreSQL service overview which incorporates account management procedures.
What PostgreSQL resources are available?
We have:
- PostgreSQL clients on every desktop
- Several managed PostgreSQL servers, including one for teaching ("pgteach") and one for research ("pgresearch").
- The backend software on some desktops (if you want to experiment with server internals).
Staff and students can be granted access as appropriate. But you may already have been granted access to this or another service based on a course you're taking (or setting), a research group, or because you need privileged access to one of our services.
VirtualBox on DICE
DICE desktops can run virtual machines. This is done with VirtualBox. (See also virtualisation.)
Where can you run VirtualBox?
DICE desktops can run VirtualBox. This includes the computers in the labs in Appleton Tower, and personal DICE computers which staff and postgraduate students may have.
Installing Kerberos and OpenAFS on Windows
Instructions for installing Kerberos.
Instructions for installing OpenAFS.
AFS for Linux
Installing / Configuring AFS on Linux
The School of Informatics uses OpenAFS for its network filesystem. This page describes how to install and configure OpenAFS on Linux. The simplest instructions for installation differ by distribution, though the basic idea and steps will usually be the same. If your distribution isn't listed, it's worth looking at a similar distribution for the basic outline.
AFS ACLs
One significant difference in the way that AFS works compared to Unix/NFS is in the use of file permissions. AFS uses Access Control Lists (ACLs), and these apply to directories. All files within a directory share the same access control permissions. Be aware that moving a file from one location to another may change its access permissions - it will inherit the permissions of the directory into which it is moved. New directories inherit the ACLs of their parent directory.
AFS top tips
This page is for those in a hurry to use AFS. For documentation and explanations see AFS and filesystems.
Self-managed backups
Backing up self-managed machines using TiBS
Please note that we have now upgraded to TiBS3 and that all versions of MacOS can now be backed up.
Users can back-up their self-managed Linux, MacOS, and Windows machines using the TiBS backup software currently used to back-up the School's commodity disk space. Use of this service requires the installation of client software on your machine (done by the user), and the authorisation of your machine to the backups server (done by Support). This document covers how to complete these steps.