Urgent changes to the student PC clusters desktop.

10 Oct 2008

Information for staff.

Each year IT services staff across campus work together to produce a desktop environment which we implement on both the public and Faculty clusters. This desktop environment (i.e. the operating system and software available on the PC) includes required updates to both desktop applications and the underlying operating system.

This year’s environment also included a necessary fundamental modification to the manner in which software is delivered onto the desktop. As usual, IT services and faculty staff deployed this new environment on public and some faculty clusters before the start of the academic year.

This new environment has been successfully deployed, is complete and contains all the applications required. Unfortunately, despite extensive testing before the start of year, we have experienced problems with slow log-in times within the public and faculty clusters which we are currently unable to resolve.

We have therefore decided to reinstall last year’s environment on the majority of clusters while we investigate and resolve the slow log-in issues. Although this is not an ideal solution, we are confident that this environment will provide the same high quality service it has given for the past year.

We apologise for this disruption to our desktop service and will post an update once the current issues have been resolved.