Current status of Maths computing facilities...

November 9^th: all active Maths research IT services available as usual

webserver security issues: the two serious vulnerabilities in PHP that were announced last week, nicknamed 'PHP2Shell', has led to all externally accessible webservers in College that use or embody PHP code being isolated from the public internet network until they have been patched, updated or rebuilt and then proved to be resistant to attack via these routes. Publicly-accessible webservers in Maths that are the responsibility of research computing have since been updated or rebuilt but there are a small number of systems used for internal browser-based functions that are not accessible from outside the College but ideally need to be updated also and this work is now in progress.

A few members of the department have externally accessible websites of their own which may have been blocked from public access; if this is you and you require help upgrading your webserver and/or web content applications such as PHP or WordPress, please get in touch with Maths research computing for assisistance.

Another vulnerability, this time dubbed 'HTTP2Shell', came to light on Monday this week affecting servers that use the Brotli compression algorithm in their httpd server code; all of our public-facing servers that uses this have since been updated with the latest version of Brotli.

Relocation of GPU network: with all the main GPU servers and the clustor4 GPU storage server now moved over to the CAGB data centre, the associated 10Gbit/s local network has since moved here as well although data stored on clustor4 is already accessible to the GPUs as well as via the College gigabit (1 Gbit/sec) network. clustor4's mirror server, clustor4-mirror, remains in the Huxley server room for better data storage resilience through using a separate building.

Last updated at 9:22 on November 9^th