Services

Facilities Management

This is the management of hardware and the operating system software up to, but not including, the application layer. Our customers are other university departments and affiliated organisations. We currently manage:

• installation and management of the server and storage systems and backups mainly delivered through virtualised infrastructure
• installation and maintenance of the operating system on these servers, including monitoring through Microsoft Operations Manager and Zabbix
• Windows update service
• the database, data warehouse and web applications servers for the IS Applications Division
• document repository systems  for the University Library and the Scottish Digital Libraries Consortium
• Data Library systems on behalf the EDINA National Data Centre and the Digitial Curation Centre
• managed Windows server/Linux/Unix services for internal and external bodies
• the virtual hosting service providing a service supporting virtual machines

University computing infrastructure

• central email services including the Edinburgh mail directory and mailing lists, virus and spam management and mail routing/relaying
• the Kerberos network authentication system including the EASE web sign-on service
• support for EntraID including MFA
• an Active Directory service
• ADFS
• the Open Directory service, used for the administration of managed Macintosh computers, as well as managing OSX based servers for other units within the University.
• an LDAP directory providing a central authorisation service
• the University's proxy web caches
• a file backup service
• contributing support to University wide computer security procedures
• X.509 certificate signing
• Shibboleth federated access management and SAML authentication
• LCFG configuration management service for Linux services
• Puppet and terraform configuration management and infrastructure instantiation
• gitlab source and configuration information repository service

Other Services

We also provide consultancy services on the use of Windows, MacOS, Unix and Linux systems, email, web applications, authentication, authorisation and directory services. In addition:

• system monitoring, logging and alerting
• support of the Information Service's internal Unix and Window servers and workstations
• software porting and development
• software/hardware demonstration and assistance with procurement
• maintaining local virus definition update mirrors. These servers provide local updates for both the McAfee and Sophos anti-virus products used by the Linux, Windows and Macintosh computers within the University.