DICE News 2002-07 #1

General: 1) Contacting support under DICE (all)
General: 2) Central Informatics web pages: access (all)

UNIX:    1) UNIX Groups

Please make sure you read the items in the 'General' category and then
in any other categories as seems appropriate.  For safety, that means
read everything :-) These postings are kept as short as practical.

(A copy of this posting will be available under
http://www.dice.informatics.ed.ac.uk/deploy/#deploy_news)

Items are usually also covered in the DICE FAQ at
http://www.dice.informatics.ed.ac.uk/faq

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General
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1) Contacting support under DICE (all)

   With the introduction of a cross-site service there will be changes
   to the way users are required to contact computing support staff.
   Each site up to now has used mail aliases.  Under DICE the support
   situation will be more complex as both services and the people
   supporting them may not be at the site where the problems are
   reported.

   In order to make the process more efficient support should be
   contacted via a simple web-form.  Minimal information is required
   but behind-the-scenes processing such as looking up machine names
   in an inventory will allow the query to be processed in the
   relevant way.  There will also be a fault-tracking system which can
   be primed with relevant information from the web form or associated
   processing.

2) Central Informatics web pages: access (all)

   The current Informatics web and CVS service will *not* be changing
   during the initial stages of DICE.  Your account, access and
   permissions to change anything will stay the same. (If you do need
   additional access then mail webadmin@inf).


UNIX
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1) UNIX Groups 

   Under DICE there will be only two primary groups: people and
   pseudo.'people' will obviously cover all staff, visitors and
   students.  ('pseudo' is for accounts that don't have real users
   associated with them.)

   There will be some secondary groups but these will be kept to a
   minimum. For those interested in the reasoning behind the change
   can find an overview in the initial Authorisation document at
   http://www.dice.informatics.ed.ac.uk/deploy/1_authorisation.html

 : Deploy 

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