2014
Computer Lab to host conference for policy making in the Big Data era
8 December 2014
The Computer Laboratory will host the 'Policy-Making in the Big Data Era' conference in June 2015. More …
EDSAC project reaches key milestone
27 November 2014
A project to recreate EDSAC has reached a key milestone. More …
Lab PhD wins Best Student Paper Award
16 November 2014
Marwa Mahmoud has been awarded the Best Student Paper award at the 2014 ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI 2014). More …
NFS version 4
11 November 2014
Support for NFS version 4 has now been enabled on the main NetApp filer "elmer". The change is upwards compatible in the sense that the older protocol remains available as well. However client systems which support multiple versions will normally use the highest version available from a server, so many machines will see a change. More …
WGB power cut 2014/11/09 17:43
9 November 2014
There was a power cut in the WGB just before 17:43 for about ten seconds. See UIS report for their timeline. More …
internal 'sysdata' web service fist to move to NFS sec=sys
27 October 2014
http://sysdata.cl.cam.ac.uk/ is the first of the Lab web services to move to Ubuntu servers running Apache 2.4 using NFS sec=krb5 to access the web pages from the filer. Please contact sys-admin if there are any problems. Other services are likely to move over in the near future. More …
Matlab updated to R2014b
23 October 2014
The version of Matlab used on lab Linux systems has been updated from R2013b to R2014b. More …
Removal of avahi-daemon from Ubuntu 14.04 systems
22 October 2014
It appears that the avahi-daemon causes the gtk+ library on Ubuntu 14.04 systems used by many GUIs (e.g. firefox and chrome) to hammer the print spooler by opening hundreds of simultaneous connections, causing the GUI to crash. To avoid this, we are removing the avahi-daemon on all Ubuntu 14.04 systems. If you manage a machine which needs it, simply add 'avahi-daemon' to /etc/user-config/bundles as usual. and it will be auto-installed. More …
Internal Lab facilities may not be available
24 September 2014
Certain commands used to do “privileged” things within the Lab may not be working for a while. If some feature you particularly need does not work, please email details to sys-admin More …
Lab PhD wins Ubicomp 2014 Best Paper Award
16 September 2014
Chloe Brown has received the Best Paper Award at the 2014 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing (Ubicomp 2014). More …
condor pool moved to NFS sec=krb5
16 September 2014
As emailed to all recent users of condor, the execute machines have now moved to NFS sec-krb5. The documentation has been updated. If anyone has problems, please email sys-admin. More …
September edition of 'The Ring' now online
15 September 2014
The September edition of 'The Ring' is now available. More …
network and Xen problems
5 September 2014
A misconfiguration in the networking kit caused an outage yesterday afternoon. This caused many Linux Xen VMs to loose access to their root filesystems, so they mounted them read-only. After rebooting some of them, one of the Xen Servers lost the ability to reboot VMs, so itself had to be rebooted, causing all its VMs to crash. Many of the filesystems were deemed "unfixable" by fsck, so fsck had to be manually run before the systems rebooted. Please let sys-admin know of any remaining problems. More …
Java 8 in Action, co-authored by the Lab's Prof Alan Mycroft and Raoul-Gabriel Urma, released
18 August 2014
Java 8 in Action, co-authored by the Computer Laboratory's Professor Alan Mycroft and PhD student Raoul-Gabriel Urma, along with Mario Fusco, has been released. More …
new slogin-otpw server - generate a new pad
8 August 2014
mgk25 has just released version 1.5 of OTPW
which does not need to use $HOME for the pad. This allows per-host
local pads, removing the problems on NFS sec=krb5 systems. The DNS name
slogin-otpw now points at the testing slogin server. Any users
need to generate a new pad by logging in and running
cl-otpw-gen. More …
Ubuntu 10.04 lucid libc bug
6 August 2014
A libc bug involving nscd may cause some Ubuntu 10.04 systems to fail in various ways. The quick fix is to run "cl-asuser service nscd stop" and "cl-update-system" to install a fixed libc. Ubuntu 10.04 is getting a bit old now, and 14.04 LTS is stable - it is straightforward to install a fresh Ubuntu 14.04 onto a Lab system while it is in use, and the reboot into the new system - email sys-admin if you would like your machine upgraded. More …
Computer Laboratory hosts 2014 GNU Tools Cauldron
23 July 2014
The 2014 GNU Tools Cauldron was recently held at the Computer Laboratory (July 18-20). The event brought together researchers and developers working on the GNU Tool Chain (the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC), the GNU Debugger (GDB) and the GNU binary utilities) and was the largest ever such meeting, with approximately 150 attendees from Universities and companies around the world. More …
Wireless outage
18 July 2014
The report I have received from the UIS about today's wireless outage is slightly inconclusive. It seems that there was a malfunction of the central controller that looks after our access points, causing them to reboot and go into a default unconfigured state. They were initially rescued by moving them to another controller, but have now been put back as they should be without further problems. More …
Testing new slogin / ssh-remote server
2 July 2014
The main Lab Linux TSS is currently running CentOS 5. We plan to move to Ubuntu Server 14.04 LTS, so have set up a testing server "sandy" (AKA slogin-new and ssh-remote-2.cl.cam.ac.uk). Please try it out and report any problems to sys-admin. More …
Lab PhDs awarded Google European Doctoral Fellowship
19 June 2014
Congratulations to Flora Ponjou Tasse and Ionel Gog who have been awarded a Google Europe Fellowship. More …
Xen Server upgrade to 6.2
1 May 2014
The last main pool of Virtual Machines will be upgraded (6.0 to 6.2) soon, probably over the Bank Holiday weekend. Attempts to do a "smooth" migration failed for the last three pools, so this time it will not be attempted. The downtime of each machine should be short, but there will be some unavailable disruption to logged in users. Please email sys-admin if you have any particular availability requirements over the weekend. More …
www-dyn(1) upgrade
28 April 2014
The server providing the www-dyn1 and www-dyn services is to be upgraded. Users are recommended to check that any pages they publish work on the www-dyn2 and www-dyn3 servers. See http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/local/web/personal.html#www-dyn for full details. More …
Professor Andy Hopper featured in the Sunday Times list of the 100 most influential Britons of the 21st century
24 March 2014
Andy Hopper, Head of Department and Professor of Computer Technology, has been named in an illustrious list of Britain's 100 most influential movers and shakers of the 21st century. More …
Further NTP related changes
24 February 2014
With the new routers, Lab machines lost the ability to NTP probe machines on the internet, as we lost stateful UDP reflexive rules. With the recent NTP amplification attacks, we have added rules which mean that machines on the internet cannot NTP probe most Lab machines (our NTP servers should still be accessible). Peerings (where source and destination ports are both 123) should still work. More …
Professor Andy Hopper named one of the UK’s 100 leading practising scientists
17 February 2014
Andy Hopper, Professor of Computer Technology and Head of Department, has been named in the Science Council's list of the country’s 100 leading practising scientists. More …
Computer Laboratory lecturers awarded Pilkington Prizes
13 February 2014
Lecturers Dr Alastair Beresford and Dr Andrew Rice have been awarded Pilkington Prizes for excellence in teaching. More …
Developer Contest - Travel Apps
23 January 2014
Prizes worth a total of £2,800 are up for grabs! More …
Purge of unused VLAN 100 IP addresses
18 January 2014
As part of a campaign to clear the use of the original lab subnet, IP address on VLAN 100 in the subnet 128.232.0.0/20 which are believed not to have not been used for a year have been removed from the DNS. Further pruning is likely in future. If you believe an address has been retired but is still needed, please email sys-admin More …
MPhil Scholarships 2014/15
17 January 2014
Advanced Computer Science MPhil Scholarships 2014-2015: The Faculty of Computer Science and Technology is pleased to announce that it will be awarding a limited number of scholarships and bursaries to UK students applying for admission for the MPhil in Advanced Computer Science for the academic year 2014-2015. The awards may include full scholarships, covering approved fees and a maintenance award, or bursaries to assist with tuition fees. More …