Periodic update (2025 June)
News and other updates for summer 2025 (updated 2025 June 24). The notes here update those from early 2025.
The Network Programme – Kelvin Building §
The campus-wide Network Programme is still asserted to be roughly on schedule and, finally, the Kelvin Building has a concrete place on the timetable.
As provisionally suggested before, it now seems likely that the programme will indeed reach the Kelvin Building in mid-2026. As of this week (2025 June 23) plans have appeared indicating initial designs of the new cable runs, for local IT consultation. The plan is to completely replace the Kelvin Building's physical networking, without major interruptions to network service. The last upgrade like this was in the mid-1990s.
These building-wide network changes will include a significant
increase in the number of Eduroam APs present in the building, which
will allow us to finally decommission our local wireless network
(ie, the GUPHYSICS and KELVIN SSIDs). That's presuming, of
course, it doesn't spontaneously decommission itself first.
Managed laptops – Windows §
Like the roll-out of management for Apple devices, all new Windows devices will be ‘managed’: this programme is referred to locally as MyDevice. We still have few firm details of how this will work in practice, but we expect it to be broadly similar to the Jamf/‘MyMac’ roll-out.
...and macOS Jamf/‘MyMac’ §
All Apple devices bought by the University are now automatically enrolled in the ‘MyMac’ programme.
A new version of macOS will be released shortly, macOS 26 (Tahoe). This is important, because when you update your Jamf-registered Mac to macOS 26, it will be enrolled in Jamf. We believe this will be unproblematic (but maybe don't do that the night before flying off to a conference; the COSE ‘tech bar’ may be able to give hands-on help).
It should now be the case that any post-2019 Mac computers are ‘known’ to the ‘MyMac’ system, and so will be included in this enrollment.
If you encounter any problems, raise Ivanti tickets, and COSE IT should be able to leap into action. But please let local IT know of these, for information.
Windows 11 Is Coming §
Windows 10 is EOL in October 2025, and the campus is certain that everything that can be updated, will be updated. There's quite a lot of auditing/discovering to be done between now and then.
Expect further updates, and requests for information, soon.
Other updates §
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College-wide GPU compute service – still being planned/designed.
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Campus-wide GitHub instance – still coming soon!
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JupyterLab: No change to the position here. This service is still broadly planned to migrate to being a college service at some point (so no change here), but it will remain a P&A service at least for the remainder of this session, at least. There has been a modest increase in the number of staff available to help with routine problems. Students who have problems in labs should be encouraged to raise tickets, and not simply shrug.
Links §
Norman