After about 4 – 5 months of troubleshooting this application with Meeting Maker’s engineers, Concordia’s SAVii site is finally back online. SAVii is the web interface to Concordia’s Scheduler+ software, which is used to schedule classrooms and other rooms around the campus.

VMWare came to the rescue allowing a clean installation of the software on a virtual machine that would not interfere with the day to day operations of our other web servers.

I finally got everything working to the point I am comfortable launching the new Support Wiki. But, there are a few flakey things here and there that will need to be adjusted to make it truly user friendly. Now, I need to finalize the print css so that it is easy to print pages from the wiki.

When I do Tier 2 support, I always feel like I am Sherlock Holmes and I am trying to resolve a WebCT mystery.  Some support requests are easy to resolve, i.e. the ones that our auto-response resolves for the student.  These are “Blues Clues”-type mysteries.  Some support requests are not always resolved by the support form, mostly due to user error because they filled out the wrong information or are not using the correct terminology, but are still easy to handle.  These are “Nancy Drew”-type mysteries.  And then, there are one-of-a-kind whoppers where I am not even sure if the student is using WebCT, and if they are, what kind of system they are using.  These are “Agatha Christie”-type mysteries with an added bonus twist.  These are the ones where you need to do research, search forums, send e-mails, etc., to see if there has been anyone else who has ever encountered this problem ever.  They also tend to require print screens, multiple e-mail involvement, and a lot of time. 

Last week, we enjoyed/are still enjoying a whopper involving a student with an intricate home network and a healthy lack of work ethic.  Currently, it is up to them to provide us with some print screens that I assume will expose their procrastination and fibbery skills.  This morning, we already received a Nancy Drew level request which, after the correct terminology was deciphered, turned out to be an issue with a full e-mail account.  Now, we received a semi-whopper involving Internet Explorer behaving badly.

There tends to be one or two whoppers that we receive from the support form each week.  This does not include the internal requests we receive.  With that, I am lucky that I enjoy putting on the Sherlock Holmes hat and resolving mysteries.

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Hdwiki design

Originally uploaded by dydimustk.

Finals stages.

Here’s what my world looks like right now. Click on the three regions to get more info.

This is your daily traffic report from the Barracuda Spam Firewall for 03/15/07.

HourÂ		Blocked: Rate ControlÂ		Blocked: Bad RecipientÂ		Blocked: SpamÂ		Blocked: VirusÂ		QuarantinedÂ		Allowed: TaggedÂ		AllowedÂ		Total Received
00		0		6		142		1		2		0		28		179
01		0		59		1410		10		42		0		213		1734
02		0		79		1278		4		71		0		162		1594
03		0		78		1239		8		52		0		98		1475
04		0		96		2306		7		162		0		146		2717
05		0		107		1868		8		152		0		154		2289
06		0		93		1672		16		56		0		198		2035
07		0		86		1579		10		61		0		305		2041
08		0		77		1922		6		61		0		391		2457
09		0		73		1735		14		121		0		620		2563
10		0		115		2075		7		90		0		636		2923
11		0		126		1591		3		92		0		643		2455
12		0		111		2449		2		106		0		529		3197
13		0		178		2080		11		85		0		726		3062
14		0		92		2285		10		103		0		740		3230
15		0		92		2242		13		84		0		598		3029
16		0		221		1968		17		75		0		611		2821
17		0		99		1879		17		56		0		421		2472
18		0		315		1565		26		49		0		401		2240
19		0		106		1436		11		55		0		370		1978
20		0		78		1441		15		29		0		248		1811
21		25		77		1541		16		37		0		270		1966
22		0		88		1377		21		17		0		272		1775
23		6		124		1456		27		42		0		345		1980
TotalÂ		31		2576		40536		280		1700		0		9125		54023

When I arrived to work today I discovered a new cart of discarded items from the ghost of I.T. past. I spent a good chunk of the morning determining which items are salvageable, recyclable, and just plain trash. We did find one of the University’s brand new VoIP Phones in the first box of junk, which was really quite scary that one of those may have accidentally been disposed. We also found some functional mice, keyboards, and keyboard trays. It was good fun to see items from I.T. past and also a bit frustrating to increase our pile of recyclables.

Remember sitting in 114 a while back impersonating a student in chat for a demonstration?  I have taken that demo and partnered it with a Discussion Board demo.  The goal is to give perspective students an opportunity to “sit in” on each of these very important elements of WebCT.

Currently, these demos can be found at:

http://concordia.csp.edu/WebCT/_Documents/_Captivate/_Students/dbdemo.htm

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Things are moving forward with our tech appeals process. The committee has updated the form to streamline the process and allow for a faster decision making process. We are also working on an automated response when an appeal form is submitted. There were some concerns about summer appeals being delayed because senate was not in session. The committee realized the need for continuous review of appeals to ensure proper processing time. There was a consensus for making a transition to a faculty led committee with student representation. In order to ensure student representation in the appeals process we have created online resources that can be accessed by student senate members from remote locations–whether or not senate is in session–and we will review previous scenarios to take precedent into consideration. I believe that these steps will help to bring additional consistency to the appeals process.

Network Services is currently working with 3 vendors (IBM, Dell, and Sun) to find a solution for consolidating our servers. So far, we have met with our Sun vendor (Collier Computing) most extensively, and we are looking forward to our meeting with our IBM vendor (TSG USA) this morning.

Here is what we’ve discovered that we will be able to do through the process so far.

• Consolidate all of our servers down to one rack.
• A consolidated SAN storage solution allowing for expansion.
• VMWare will be a large part of the consolidation.
• Moving from 30 servers to potentially under 10.
• Include all servers in on this project including new Banner servers.
• The time line is yet to be determined, but it is based on a number of factors including cost and the timing of the new Banner project.
• Backup (Cold Swap), and Development servers will remain on the old servers.

In my spare time I’ve been looking over various Network Policies from other universities and corporations. The first thing I noticed was that it was a little difficult to find the CSP policy (here). Second, our is a pretty poorly written policy. We have some very basic ideas, but there isn’t any information about: newer technologies that people are using; how do we protect children (i.e. predators or pornography); or even the DMCA (here). So I’ve been collecting ideas from everyone else who has written a policy and trying to put them into my own words. If anyone has thoughts or ideas that they would like to see added just let me know.