ITS Communications Corner Announcements

ITS will be moving production databases to new equipment beginning at 7:00 AM on Saturday June 13, 2009. This maintenance is expected to be complete by 3:00-4:00 PM. An email will be sent out once the database is available.

The following systems and services will be unavailable during the maintenance window:

• MyUniverse
  
• Student Web Registration (ResQPortal)
  
• Student Registration (Mainframe)
  
• COD XML System - Financial Aid back office
  
• ResNet Registration
  
• Phone Book (all J2EE applications)
  
• Heat - Help desk
  
• Some Library systems which utilize Oracle
  
• CardID system (system for printing UNI ID cards)
  

• Campus Web based E-Mail
  
• WebCT
  
• MEMFIS
  
• CatID Reset
  

The Blackboard/WebCT learning management and ePortfolio system will be shutdown Saturday June 13, 2009, at 4:00 p.m. to move the database to new equipment. Maintenance is expected to be complete and service restored Sunday, June 14, 2009, at 12:00 noon.

During this time students, teaching assistants, instructors and designers will not be able to access eLearning for UNI academic courses, administrative departmental courses, Continuing Education and Guided Independent Study courses, Allen College Courses, Camp Adventure courses, National Program for Playground Safety courses or any personal electronic portfolios hosted on the system.

If you need additional assistance please contact the Computer Consulting Center (CCC) at (319) 273-5555. The CCC is located in Room 36 ITTC Building. Consultants are available to provide hands-on assistance daily Monday through Friday during University Business Hours.

The major central database server outage scheduled for Saturday June 13th, has been rescheduled for one week later.

The eLearning maintenance scheduled for Saturday June 13th, has been rescheduled for one week later.

As you've probably noticed, Active Directory & DNS have suffered a critical failure. We have an emergency support case open with Microsoft to attempt to resolve this issue. We've also modified DHCP to point at the UNIX DNS servers until Active Directory service can be restored. A release/renew should at least restore that basic connectivity, and if users' credentials are cached on their workstations, they can log in, however, things that rely on AD authentication will most likely not be working.

We don't have an ETA yet, but if I had to guess, I'd say it'll be several hours at this point.

Service has been restored. DHCP has been modified to push the AD DNS servers once more. If you have errors persist after obtaining the correct DNS information once more, please report them to Seth Bokelman so that he may investigate them.

We're not entirely sure what caused the problem yet, and are still working with Microsoft in an attempt to narrow it down. Preliminary information suggests that one domain controller had some sort of error/corruption that caused problems on the other two servers.

We will continue to work with Microsoft support to identify the root cause.

The postmaster is getting reports that multiple people are not receiving emails from off campus. She is on the phone with support and updates well be sent as the status changes.

It has been verified that we are currently not receiving emails from off campus. The postmaster is working with support on the issue. Messages being sent to our domains from off campus should be receiving a retry failure so, they should be resent when the issue is resolved. Updates will be posted as we have them.

We are now accepting emails from off campus and emails that were already on IronMail are being processed and delivered.

A 400-pair cable was cut in a construction zone this morning, causing a voice telecommunications outage for the following buildings:

CAC
KAB
SWT
H-32

Incoming calls to extensions in the buildings impacted will go to their respective voice mail boxes.

Incoming calls to Auto Attendants will work (Press 1 for this; Press 2 for that, Press 3 to speak with so-and-so); calls to information voice mailboxes in the attendants will work, and selections to individual extensions will go to the respective voice mailboxes.

Outgoing calls from extensions in the impacted buildings will not work (no dial tone).

We do not currently have an estimate on time-to-repair…….

Randy Hayes
Voice Services Manager

As of 2:45 PM, a cable repair crew was on the scene of the cable cut.

The estimated repair window is 3 hours.

As each cable pair is repaired, telephone service to the extension on that pair should be restored.

HOWEVER:

• Some digital telephones may not come-up on their own. If so, unplug & plug-in telephone set. If it does not come back at all, please call 35555 and report the problem.
  
• For digital display telephones, there may be a request on the display to reset the speakerphone. To do so, press the button directly under the word “Begin” in the display.

Thank you for your patience during this unanticipated outage!

Randy Hayes
Voice Services Manager

The Blackboard/WebCT learning management and ePortfolio system will be shutdown Saturday June 20, 2009 at 4:00 p.m. to move the database to new equipment. Maintenance is expected to be complete and service restored Sunday, June 21, 2009 at 12:00 noon.

During this time students, teaching assistants, instructors and designers will not be able to access eLearning for UNI academic courses, administrative departmental courses, Continuing Education and Guided Independent Study courses, Allen College Courses, Camp Adventure courses, National Program for Playground Safety courses or any personal electronic portfolios hosted on the system.

If you need additional assistance please contact the Computer Consulting Center (CCC) at (319) 273-5555. The CCC is located in Room 36 ITTC Building. Consultants are available to provide hands-on assistance daily Monday through Friday during University Business Hours.

Maintenance originally scheduled for Saturday, June 13 has been postponed until Saturday, June 20. The following systems and services will be unavailable during the maintenance window on June 20:

• MyUniverse
  
• Student Web Registration (ResQPortal)
  
• Student Registration (Mainframe)
  
• COD XML System - Financial Aid back office
  
• ResNet Registration
  
• Phone Book (all J2EE applications)
  
• Heat - Help desk
  
• Some Library systems which utilize Oracle
  
• CardID system (system for printing UNI ID cards)

• Campus Web based E-Mail
  
• WebCT
  
• MEMFIS
  
• CatID Reset

Some residual problems from the weekend's hardware upgrade for the database servers have now been resolved. Some users were experiencing an "out of process memory" error when trying to login. The server memory space has been reconfigured and no new connections have been refused since that change was made.

Please report any further problems directly to the Computer Consulting Center (CCC) at (319) 273-5555.

The MEMFIS applications outage previously announced may be delayed until July 3. A final decision will be posted after Tuesday, June 23.

All MEMFIS applications will be unavailable from 6:00 am to 3:00 pm on Saturday, June 27th.  This will affect all MEMFIS applications including self service and timecard processing. There should not be any noticeable impact for users after the upgrade completes.

There will be a maintenance window for the campus voice telecommunications system on Thursday, June 25th, from 5:00 PM to 8:00 PM.

We anticipate a total voice system outage lasting less than two hours.

Wireless will be undergoing maintenance on 6/25 from 5:30-7:30 AM and maintenance is also planned for 6/26 5:30-7:30 AM. Wireless will be unavailable from 5:30-6:30 AM on both days.

The Oracle database server requires a restart on Wednesday, July 1, 2009, 6:00 a.m. – 6:30 a.m. This will impact eLearning (Blackboard/WebCT) and WEBP (MyUNIverse portal) databases. The system will be available by 6:30 a.m.

All MEMFIS applications will be unavailable from 6:00 am to 3:00 pm on Friday, July 3^rd instead of the previously announced June 27.  This will affect all MEMFIS applications including self service and timecard processing. There should not be any noticeable impact for users after the upgrade completes.