2010
Network flood
2 December 2010
A traffic flood from a research group machine caused some network performance problems between sometime in the small hours of Thursday 2nd December and about 09:40 when the source was identified and disconnected. Our use of VLANs to separate traffic did a reasonable job of confining the problem, but there were a few knock-on effects; in particular one of the DNS resolvers found itself behind an overloaded link causing slow name lookups. Some overnight jobs may have misbehaved as a consequence. More …
Sir Maurice Wilkes, DFBCS FREng FRS
29 November 2010
It is with sadness that we announce the death of Sir Maurice Wilkes on November 29th 2010. More …
"wgb" wireless network
19 November 2010
The "wgb" wireless network is running very slowly at the moment and is congested. The reason for this is that the ADSL connectivity that lies behind it has been capped at 128kbit/s because of excessive usage under Demon's fair usage policy. We are allowed 200GB in any rolling 30-day period, and it seems that this has recently been exceeded. More …
Recruiting excellence: the Computer Lab's recruitment fair is a sell-out
10 November 2010
Fifty-one companies will converge on the Computer Laboratory, on Thursday November 18th, for its annual recruitment fair. More …
Computer Laboratory PhD scoops Distinguished Dissertation Award.
9 November 2010
Magnus Myreen has been named the winner of the BCS Distinguished Dissertation competition 2010, for 'Formal verification of machine-code programs'. More …
Network switch failure
21 October 2010
A network switch providing connections in the north east corner of the first floor failed shortly after 04:00 this morning (2010-10-21). It is one of two switches in the wiring closet so some machines and telephones in the area would have lost all connectivity whilst others were working normally. More …
Mail server replacement
15 October 2010
The last exim3 MTA (whittlesey) is about to be replaced by an exim4 one (sutton). This should not cause any disruption, but please email sys-admin if you suspect any problems. If email is completely failing, do phone or come to see us. Shutting down the last exim 3 server allows us to drop legacy features, and when we are convinced we won't need to roll back to either of the old exim3 servers, we'll be in a position to make use of new facilities in exim4. More …
slogin-serv* hosts IP addresses changing
11 October 2010
The IP addresses associated with the slogin-serv* servers is changing as they are moving to a subnet for machines using NFS sec=sys. This may cause ssh to warn that that the IP address differs, but that the host key matches. This is not a problem, so type "yes" to connect. e.g. More …
PhD student wins best student paper award at MASCOTS 10.
20 September 2010
PhD student, Sherif Akoush, has won the best student paper award at the 18th Annual Meeting of the IEEE International Symposium on Modeling, Analysis and Simulation of Computer and Telecommunications Systems. The paper, Predicting the Performance of Virtual Machine Migration, is joint work with Professor Andy Hopper, Dr Andrew W Moore, Dr Andrew Rice and Dr Ripduman Sohan. More …
Computer Laboratory student wins prestigious undergraduate award.
6 September 2010
The Science Student of the Year winners were recently announced at The Science, Engineering & Technology (SET) Student of the Year Awards in London. More …
PhD student wins Best Paper Award at IWITMA 2010
25 August 2010
PhD student, Fernando Ramos, has won the Best Paper Award at the 2nd International Workshop on IPTV Technologies and Multidisciplinary Applications (IWITMA 2010). The paper, 'Channel Smurfing: Minimising Channel Switching Delay in IPTV Distribution Networks', is joint work with Professor Jon Crowcroft and Dr Richard Gibbens, both of the Computer Laboratory, Professor Ian White of the University of Cambridge Department of Engineering, and Dr Pablo Rodriguez of Telefonica Research, Barcelona. More …
PhD students win Best Student Paper award at USENIX Security '10.
23 August 2010
Robert Watson and Jonathan Anderson, PhD students at the Computer Laboratory, and Ben Laurie and Kris Kennaway of Google UK Ltd, have won the Best Student Paper award at USENIX Security ’10 for ‘Capsicum: Practical Capabilities for UNIX’. The research was sponsored by Google. More …
WGB power outages
11 August 2010
The WGB lost power on Wed 11th Aug 2010 and three times on Sat 14th due to the main 240v breaker in GN17 tripping, probably caused by a problem with the temperature sensor, from reports of other sites. It is likely to require a six hour power down at some future time to fix it (unrelated to the per-corridor shutdown on 16th August for monitoring work). More …
Professor Andy Hopper honoured at Queen's University, Belfast
9 August 2010
Professor Andy Hopper has received an honorary doctorate - DSc (Eng) - from Queen's University, Belfast, for services to information technology and business and commerce. More …
Caller ID presentation on Lab phones
6 August 2010
The new University phone system has the ability to present "caller id" on external phone calls as the actual DDI number of the phone, rather than the generic university switchboard number. This makes it easier for people to call you back. Whether the number actually reaches the called party is dependent on a number of technical and administrative factors; at present it will work for most calls to UK landlines. Unfortunately it won't work for most calls to mobile numbers. More …
Demise of Computing Service usenet server and email to it
29 July 2010
The Computing Service have announced that the University usenet news server will shut down at the beginning of next month (August 2010). Their announcement suggests alternative usenet sources. More …
Wireless network migration plans
19 July 2010
This is a status report on the planned upgrade to the wireless network, and a request for testing and feedback on the migration strategy. More …
PhD student wins best paper award
12 July 2010
PhD student Shazia Afzal has won the best paper award, at the 10th IEEE International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies, for 'Modelling Affect in Learning - Motivation and Methods'. More …
Computer Lab enjoys high profile visit
12 July 2010
Professor Andy Hopper was delighted to welcome Carlos Slim, Sir Evelyn de Rothschild, Lady Lynn de Rothschild and Lord Martin Rees to discuss the Computer Laboratory's research on computing for the future of the planet. More …
Eduroam
14 June 2010
I have received a couple of samples of the new wireless access points that we intend to install over the summer. I have placed one of them so that it should provide some Eduroam coverage to the Street area. More …
Tim Griffin wins ACM SIGCOMM Test of Time Paper Award 2010
8 June 2010
Tim Griffin, Senior Lecturer at the Computer Laboratory, and Gordon Wilfong have been awarded the ACM SIGCOMM Test of Time Paper Award 2010 for "An analysis of BGP convergence properties". More …
New package signing key
8 June 2010
A new key has been generated to sign all Lab packages (RPMs and
.debs). This has been installed on most Lab managed machines. Private
machines which use the Lab repositories will need to register the new
key. On a debian based system use "apt-key
add" and on an RPM based system use "rpm
--import", using the key on the lab web server, e.g. one of:
wget -O -
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/deb/cl.cam.ac.uk-archive-keyring.gpg | sudo
apt-key add -; wget -O - www/deb/KEY|sudo apt-key add -; sudo rpm
--import http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/RPM/RPM-GPG-KEY-CL; More …
Filer problems May bank holiday weekend
1 June 2010
Between sometime in the evening of Sunday 30th May and early morning on Tuesday 1st June the performance of the NetApp filer "elmer" was so badly degraded as to be effectively unusable. The problems affected various services, including the main lab web server. More …
Chips, worms and grey matter: more similar than you think
5 May 2010
Computer Laboratory PhD student Dan Greenfield is among the team of computer and neuroscientists who have discovered “striking similarities” between human brains, the nervous system of the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans and computer chips. More …
The University of Cambridge invites you to participate in the FluPhone Pilot Study
22 April 2010
We would like to invite you to participate in the pilot period of the FluPhone study, an experiment being conducted by researchers at the University of Cambridge, the University of Liverpool and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. More …
Migrating the filer to a new IP address - second stage
31 March 2010
On 22nd February I wrote about the start of a campaign to the migrate the NetApp filer "elmer" to a new IP address. There have been a few hiccups, but by and large the migration has gone smoothly. The vast majority of machines migrated to the new address of their own accord, and over the last few days the stragglers have been cajoled into moving by more or less drastic means. More …
Migrating the filer to a new IP address
22 February 2010
We will shortly be making a change to the DNS to change the default IP address that is used to access the main filer, elmer. The motivation for the change is to deal with some security issues that are currently preventing the use of the latest version of the NFS protocol. More …
Web browser proxy configurations
4 February 2010
The Computing Service have recently announced that their web proxy service is to close. We have not recommended use of this service for many years, but there is still some legacy from the time when it was strongly recommended. Part of that legacy is a collection of proxy configuration files in our WWW server that some older browsers may be configured to consult. More …
Computer Laboratory receives one of Google's new Focused Research Awards
4 February 2010
The University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory has become the only university outside the US to receive a Google Focused Research Award. More …