VLE Services Status

Relocating

gstewar8 — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 21:48:41 +0000

Most of our content is actually located at: . It is here that you can find our list of work, current work and product owners.

Gerwood

2009S2 Blackboard unit creation

gstewar8 — Thu, 14 May 2009 05:05:59 +0000

We are about to commence the build batch run for the BB 2009S2 units. We’ve spent a lot of time over the last few weeks trying to remove units that do not need to be made or ensuring units are created as unit co-ordinators have indicated (thank you, it helped greatly) they would prefer.

If you have any issues on monday in regards to the right content having been created please contact the UNE Online Helpdesk or ITD Helpdesk (x5000) and explain the problem so that we can correct it.

Thank you

Gerwood Stewart
Senior Programmer/System Administrator

Performance Enchancment to Sakai

gstewar8 — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 04:17:53 +0000

Sakai will be upgraded tomorrow morning at approximately 4am to include several new enhancements to the database which should improve it’s performance in several areas

Chat (not significant)
Wiki (significant, but not necessarily complete, i.e. may not improve all functions)
Forum notifcations on home page. Performance is still slow but has been improved by a factor of approx 4x

These enhancements are ‘non-invasive’ and will not require an outage or down-time. Some performance may be temporarily impacted while the database changes are performed, but service should not be interrupted.

Gerwood Stewart

Database change successful

gstewar8 — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 21:58:06 +0000

The database change yesterday was successful with no problems found with the configuration change. As noted yesterday we hope this will increase the stability of the system for the 2009 teaching periods.

Gerwood Stewart
Senior Programmer/System Administrator
ITD (VLE Systems)

Reconfiguration of TLCAdmin and eSubmission

gstewar8 — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 00:17:44 +0000

The ‘connector’ applications used to tie together the VLE services at UNE require a change to their configuration so that they do not overly consume data centre resources.

The changes have been tested in development for the last two weeks and we feel they have performed well.

We intend to switch production over to this new configuration today at 1pm. The outage will be for up to an hour, finishing at 2pm.

If you require access to Sakai and Blackboard during this time it will still be available, however you will need to access these services directly:

To do this use the following links
Blackboard: http://olt.une.edu.au
Sakai: http://sakai.une.edu.au/portal

The applications that will be unavailable during this period are:

TLCAdmin
eSubmission
Internal Applications

admin
webservices
portal (not the MyUNE web portal)

The MyUNE portal will be adjusted with a notice of the outage and student will be able to continue accessing their materials directly through Blackboard and Sakai by following the same links above, which will be made available to them in the MyUNE portal.

Thank you

Gerwood Stewart
Senior Programmer / System Administrator
Information Technology Directorate
University of New England

Outage for VLE Systems

gstewar8 — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 21:41:03 +0000

There has been an outage this morning between 8-9am to move the VLE systems: TLCAdmin, eSubmission, Portlets, webservices and related apps. This is being done to transfer these items to the new 10g Oracle cluster. As a result of this Sakai has also had to be shutdown to change one of its configuration items.

With this done this should remove the VLE systems from the old 9i database system and give better scalability and reliability into the future.

Sakai outage

gstewar8 — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 01:38:12 +0000

Short (10 minute) outage today at approximately 11.30 to rectify what appears to have been a hung thread which was impacting performance for the rest of Sakai.

Cause is being investigated.

eSubmission v1.5.0 (Staff Upgrade) complete

gstewar8 — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 01:58:54 +0000

The new version of eSubmission has now been launched in production and is ready to go.

If you have any questions about the new features you can take a look at the manuals, call the helpdesk on 5000 or talk to Gerwood (ext 3228) and Ben (ext 3221) if you would like an introduction to the system.

eSubmission Upgrade Tue 23rd Sept

gstewar8 — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 01:25:20 +0000

eSubmission is being upgraded to version 1.5.0 on 23rd September. This upgrade contains an almost complete re-work of the staff management area with what is hoped to be a large functional improvement.

Improvements include:

CSV upload and download of grades.
Ability for co-ordinators to record the method of submission and return of assignments.
Easier to view and use grades page. Including quick summary of recieved, returned assignments and grades given.
Full feedback system: now includes upload of files as feedback (global and per student) including returning assignments electronically
Ability to add Marks out of and percentage of final grade to assignment information.
More informative grades release (includes date released)

To go with this TLC is launching the eSubmission documentation area within the new UNE wiki: eSubmission manuals and how-tos. Here you will find all the documentation for eSubmission and How-Tos to setup and get the most use out of eSubmission.

Welcome to the VLE Services Status blog

gstewar8 — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 23:47:28 +0000

This blog is designed to be a singular place to provide information about the status of the various systems that make up the University of New England’s Virtual Learning Environment.

It is only intended to hold basic service information such as services being taken down for maintenance or a system be unavailable or upgraded, a new feature being launched as a result of an upgrade or a bug that has been found or corrected.

The blog is designed to be subscribed to so that you don’t have to keep coming back to check and changes can reach you automatically.