On Tuesday, November 17, at 7am, Information Technology Services will reboot one of our servers. This will cause several associated services to go down: the Solaris login server (bingsuns), the Linux login server (harvey), the Linux Classroom, access to H-drives, and access to licensed software in the PODs. Everything should be back in operation by 7:30am. Sorry for the inconvenience this may cause. If you have any questions, please contact the ITS Help Desk at 607-777-6420 or helpdesk@binghamton.edu.

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Bytes 'n Bites is a casual forum for discussion of technology issues for the Binghamton University community. Bring your lunch, your questions, your comments. High Performance Computing: Meet the TeraGrid

• When: Noon – 1:00 pm. Wednesday, November 11, 2009
• Where: Science Library 210

Computer needs for today’s research sometimes involve simulations that are computed on a very fine grid or involve analysis of data from very large data sets.

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Blackboard has been mostly stable for several weeks and completely stable for over a week. Hot fixes have been installed in the production instance to insure that the system doesn’t need to restart itself any more. All the modules and building blocks we intended to have installed are now functioning.

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Data gathered over the past day has pinpointed the cause of the problem that has been plaguing Blackboard. We are no longer experiencing system instability. Blackboard is developing a patch that will replace the temporary one we are now using. Throughout the day today, we will be reactivating the portal module and the building blocks that had been deactivated while we searched for the cause of our problem.

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A significant Blackboard patch is being installed on our test system and tested over night. If successful, the patch will be installed on our production servers early tomorrow morning.

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As of 4:30 on Thursday, September 10, we stopped reactivating building blocks so that we could examine today’s logs more carefully. As we gain confidence in Blackboard stability, we will be focusing more on improving response time.

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As of 4:30 p.m. Wednesday, Sept. 9, Blackboard was stable for an entire business day. Some additional changes were made at Blackboard’s suggestion and ITS plans to reactivate some of the Blackboard modules that were previously deactivated throughout the morning today, Sept. 10. Binghamton staff will continue to monitor system stability and update the campus on their progress.

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As of 4:30 pm on Tuesday, September 8, some additional configuration changes suggested by Blackboard Support have been applied. Performance has improved somewhat.

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As of 4:30 pm on Thursday, September 3, some configuration changes suggested by Blackboard Support had been applied and performance has improved somewhat. We are comfortable enough to reactivate the My Organizations module in Blackboard. We continue to monitor the system and analyze logs around periods of poor performance. You can expect additional configuration changes. We may have to take the system down and restart it for some changes to take effect. Thank you for your patience as we tune the new system for better performance.

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As of late Wednesday afternoon Sept. 2, Blackboard was still exhibiting intermittent performance problems. Both BU staff and Blackboard are actively working to diagnose the problem. There may be periods of extreme slowness or system unavailability. In order to determine the cause of the problem it may be necessary to take down certain modules or features for a time. There may also be times during the day when the system will have to be restarted to activate a change to system parameters. We appreciate the patience users have shown and we will continue to provide progress updates.

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