Electrical Outage – Aug 30-31

An upgrade to the electrical power infrastructure for the UTD campus will be performed on Saturday, August 30 and Sunday, August 31. The power upgrade will require the disruption of regular and emergency electrical power to most computer systems. As a result, many computer systems (including WebCT, Email, Galaxy, and SIS) will not be operational during the outage. We apologize for the disruption in service to the University’s user community. The patience and tolerance of the user community is greatly appreciated as this necessary work is accomplished.

Computer systems availability will generally be disrupted beginning at 6:00 PM on Saturday, August 30, when systems will be taken down on a phased basis. Electrical work will begin at 10:00 PM and it should conclude around 7:00 AM on Sunday morning, August 31. Power will be restored at approximately that time. All systems should be back on-line no later than 12:00 noon on Sunday, August 31.

The patience and tolerance of the University’s user community is greatly appreciated. Thank you.

Streaming Video Server Has Been Restored

A new server has replaced the streaming video server that crashed earlier today. You should now be able to access all of the video and audio files. Should you encounter any issues accessing a streamed video or audio file, please contact us at som-elearning@utdallas.edu We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.

Streaming Server Outage

This message is to inform all online students and faculty that the server that stores our streaming video (i.e. faculty intro videos, short video clips in courses) has crashed.

Please note that this affects a very small percentage of our course materials; however, we are working as quickly as we can to get a replacement server and restore the video content.

Please contact us if you have any questions or need any further information.

Update: WebCT availability this weekend

Based on recent changes to campus power outage schedules:

Sunday, June 22nd: WebCT availability should not be affected by the limited power outage.

Sunday, June 29th: WebCT should be up and running with generator power during the campus wide power outage. However, network availability of WebCT, especially for users on campus or in Waterview Park/University Village, may be interrupted. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause you.

WebCT – Upcoming Power Outage

Just received this note from the WebCT folks on campus:

WebCT is on generator backup and expected to remain operational during the upcoming campus power outage this Sunday, June 22, 10am-2pm. However, due to potential network connectivity issues that are outside of our control, we cannot guarantee that WebCT will be accessible for the entirety of the power outage. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause you.

WebCT Scheduled Downtime

UTD Information Resources has announced hardware upgrades on Sunday, March 2 and Sunday, March 9 that will result in WebCT downtime from 7:00 am to 10:00 am CT.

We urge you to schedule your studies around the outages, as WebCT will not be available during these times.

WebCT Issues

We are hearing from faculty and students (and we ourselves have found) that WebCT is experiencing issues this morning. People are trying to load their course lists, but it does not pull up. (We have heard of some other issues that might be related as well — problems uploading files if you are able to get into WebCT, and getting “access has been denied” errors when trying to access a specific course.) We’ve contacted the WebCT admins in Info Resources, and they’re looking into the issue. We’ll post updates here as we get them.

Update (1/7, 3:10pm): IR has opened a ticket with Blackboard/WebCT. They’re working to solve this problem ASAP.

Update (1/7, 6:50pm): The WebCT server was rebooted at around 5:50pm, and things seem to be better. Most of us are now able to log in and access our course lists. If you’re still experiencing problems, however, please be sure and email us.

Update (1/7, 7:08pm): Unfortunately, it seems that we spoke to soon. Server issues still exist. IR is still working with Blackboard/WebCT on this. We’ll post any updates we receive. (FYI — IR also has a page where they post updates on outages.)

Update (1/8, 3:10pm): The IR Outage Updates page is reporting that they have a potential fix. They’re in the process of rebooting the WebCT server in order to implement this fix.

Update (1/8, 6:10pm): Unfortunately, the earlier attempt to fix the WebCT issues we’re seeing did not help. We’ve been assured by IR that they will be working through the night to get this resolved. We apologize for the inconvenience. Thank you for your patience.

Update (1/9, 9:10am): Please visit the IR Outage Updates page for further updates to this situation. Thanks.

WebCT Upgrade/Outage

The following message was just added to the Announcements in WebCT; however, just in case any of you missed it, we’re re-posting it here:

WebCT Unavailable, 5pm 14 Dec through 16 Dec

The UTD eLearning Team is pleased to announce that an updated version of WebCT is ready to be released to the campus. This will be a minor update, from version CE 6.1.0 to CE 6.2.2, and will not be as disruptive as the change from CE 4.1 to CE 6.0. There are many benefits this will offer to the UTD community, including more than 2000 bug fixes, and several feature enhancements, listed at the link below.

Upgrade Schedule: The update will take place from 5:00 pm Friday, 14 December 2007 through Sunday, 16 December 2007. Please see the eLearning Team website for the list of enhancements and other details.

WebCT Sporadic Errors

We received the following late last night from our WebCT Administrators:

We’ve received confirmed reports of sporadic system exceptions within WebCT, not confined to specific tools (quizzes, file download, etc). We believe this may be related to database problems, which are currently being investigated.

We have determined the source of the WebCT database problems, and are taking steps to repair it. A data recovery process will be running overnight, and should be completed in the morning. We’ll have further status updates then.

Please email som-elearning@utdallas.edu if you are still having problems this morning. Thank you for your patience.

Update (11:25am): We are hearing from students and faculty that problems still exist. We just received an update from our admins a few minutes ago letting us know that they are still working on the issue.

Update (4:17pm): Our administrators are working directly with Blackboard/WebCT to fix the problem. They are hoping to have this issue resolved today; however, they say it could be as late as tomorrow early morning before the server is running normally. We apologize for any inconvenience this causes. We will post more updates as we receive them.

Update (9:55am, Sept.18): We do not yet have any update from our WebCT Admins; however, we do know that the problem still exists. We will post any information we receive. Thank you for your patience.

Update (10:41am): Just received this from our admins:

WebCT is still experiencing the System Exception Errors that manifested on Sunday. We are still in the process of repairing the database error. We are in contact with WebCT’s technical support to expedite solution discovery. We are working to resolve this issue as quickly as possible with no further data loss.

Update (5:54pm): We just received an email from our administrators. The email was sent out to all university faculty, staff, and students. To read the complete email, which includes issues that have been verified as directly related to this problem, please check your @utdallas.edu email account.

We are near the end of a second major data recovery effort towards resolving the system errors affecting WebCT. This evening, we should conclude the course of action WebCT Technical Support believes will repair the damage WebCT has suffered.

Update (8:21am, Sept.19): WebCT is currently down due to emergency maintenance. The current WebCT site has a link to the Server Outage website for updates. We will continue posting updates on this blog as we get information.

Update (9:31am): Received the following from our WebCT admins:

The data recovery effort completed last night has not brought a solution to the ongoing problems with WebCT. We are now attempting an expanded data recovery effort, which is currently requiring the database to be down. Based on the progress of the last three hours, this recovery will take at least another six hours to run. We are attempting to resolve this issue with speed as well as caution, in order to prevent or minimize data loss.

Update (6:44pm): Our administrators are now working with Blackboard/WebCT and Oracle on the database issues that are the cause of our server problems. They have determined the reason why previous attempts to restore WebCT to normal functionality have failed. Unfortunately, we are told, the recovery process they have just started is to take another eight hours to completed; however, they are very confident that this will fix our server issue and restore WebCT to full functionality. As always, we will post any further information we receive.

Update (6:56pm): I just noticed on the Server Outage website that they have posted the following:

WebCT outage is expected to last through 8:00am, 20 Sep 2007.

Update (7:23pm): Just received the following from our admins:

We’ve been working with the top tiers of support at both WebCT and Oracle today, and after hours of collaborative investigation, we have discovered the root cause of errors we have been running into with our data recovery efforts. Those errors have been rectified, and we are now cleared to perform another data recovery. This will run overnight, and WebCT will continue to be unavailable while this process runs. At this point, we are expecting to bring WebCT back online by 9am tomorrow morning, with no loss to data within the system. We appreciate your continued patience through this extremely frustrating situation.

Update (8:45am, Sept.20): Just received the following from our admins:

I am relieved to report that WebCT is up and functioning again as of 8:00am this morning. Initial testing shows that the errors encountered since Sunday have been resolved. There does not appear to have been any data loss in the system recovery, but we do encourage faculty and students to verify any changes or submission made recently. We thank you for your patience shown during this ordeal.

Testing Locations Map Problem

I’ve had a few of you who are getting an early start to setting up your proctored exams (bless you!) contact me reporting problems with the Testing Locations Map. We use a free web service called YourGMap for this, and we’ve found out that they are having some major server issues. It looks like they had a hard drive fail on Thursday morning, and they’re actively working to remedy the situation. They anticipate that maps will be back up and available on Saturday. Thank you for your patience.

Update: The testing locations map is back up.