Periodic update (2023 March)

News and other updates for Winter/Spring 2023. This is an update on the 2022 December notes.

COSE IT helpdesk §

The ‘COSE IT helpdesk’ is now deemed to be the primary route for requesting IT help, for staff, PGs and UGs alike. Go to https://www.gla.ac.uk/helpdesk and search for the COSE IT ‘tile’. That's probably the most efficient route for IT-related queries which are ‘routine’ in some sense. For these queries, the helpdesk is therefore a Good Thing.

We don't plan to shut down the phas-it@glasgow.ac.uk inbox (rebellion!) – this is probably a better route for queries which are vague, or which will obviously require discussion. That said, we might in some circumstances create a helpdesk ticket from your email, at least in part to keep our statistics right.

brutha/jupyterhub §

We've been seeing a number of problems to do with saving JupyterHub notebooks, which have been hard to pin down.

Our currently favoured hypothesis is that this is related to the changes we've made, this year, to limit per-process memory and CPU usage, and to the sub-optimal behaviour of the currently deployed version of JupyterHub, when a notebook hits these limits.

We've relaxed the memory limitations, but we're wary of making substantial changes to the JupyterHub configuration at this point in the year.

Right now, the most cautious advice to students would be to avoid having more than one notebook open at once. It would probably be good to make a point of logging out of the service when work is done, but that might be just superstition at this point.

Request for data: If you see students experiencing a problem here

please do tell us (at phas-it@glasgow.ac.uk)
please note the date and time
...and any error messages or other unusual behaviour
...and any other information about the student's environment that might plausibly be relevant, such as single/multiple notebooks, a memory-heavy or CPU-heavy notebook, or...?

Recent changes §

MFA changes: apparently uneventful; MFA now being used for more things.
NIIP: still on track. Though details are still vague, there will probably be some concrete progress this year, in terms of new networking kit being installed. and including upgrades to Eduroam.

Links §

Any questions, phas-it@glasgow.ac.uk is hanging on the telephone, awaiting your call.

Norman