Support

The service desk is the first point of contact for all questions relating to EIDF. Support is available Monday to Friday from 09:00 until 17:00, excluding UK public holidays. You can reach the Service Desk by e-mail through the address on the "Contact us" page.

EIDF service desk

Contact the service desk at eidf@epcc.ed.ac.uk

For support queries, please try to provide as much background information as possible. This will help us speed up the processing time considerably. We will ask you for your user ID, project code(s), and, where applicable, a description of the actions you were taking and the error message (if any) you got.

How the service desk ticket system works

When you submit a query by email it is placed in the "SAFE" query system. You will normally get an automatic acknowledgment by email, including a tracking ID, within a few minutes. If you submit your query directly through SAFE, it will give you a tracking ID at once. A few minutes later, your query will be assigned to the appropriate expert within the EIDF team to handle.

The expert may contact you to discuss your problem or to get extra information. When the expert has resoved your query (hopefully!) they will send you an answer, and the query will be closed. At this point the service desk team will send you another message, telling you that this has happened.

Closed queries are kept in the SAFE database so that we can refer back to them when solving future problems, and when writing documentation, etc. The SAFE database is governed according to our Personal Data and Privacy Policy, linked below, and accessible through the "About EIDF" menu.

EIDF regular maintenance

There will be a service outage on the 3rd Thursday of every month from 9am to 5pm. We keep maintenance downtime to a minimum on the service but do occasionally need to perform essential work on the system. Maintenance sessions are used to ensure that:

  • essential security patches are applied;
  • software versions are kept up to date;
  • firmware levels on peripheral equipment are kept up to date;
  • failed/suspect hardware can be replaced;
  • new software can be installed;
  • essential maintenance on electrical and mechanical support equipment (cooling systems and power distribution units) can be undertaken safely.

We will email users ahead of the maintenance outage to remind them that the service will be be unavailable.  The service will be returned to service ahead of 5pm if all the work is completed early.

Links

Personal Data and Privacy Policy

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