Storage Upgrade for Blackboard/Elluminate, Complete

By Glen Parker | Published: May 10, 2012

The upgrade was successful, and done well ahead of schedule. All services are back online as of 11:59pm.
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The storage system on which Blackboard runs will undergo an upgrade tonight (Thursday, May 10th) beginning at 9pm and concluding tomorrow morning by 6am.
During this time Blackboard and Elluminate will be unavailable.
Please save any work before 9pm or risk it being lost.

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Problems with Safe Assign, Mobile Learn, resolved

By Glen Parker | Published: April 24, 2012

I finally found the problem. Last Friday during the panic part of backing out the Blackboard patch, Blackboard accidentally put an old intermediate SSL certificate in place of the current intermediate certificate. The result, while not technically broken, our SSL was not as secure as it could have been, and both Mobile Learn and Safe Assign are overly sensitive to this situation. They couldn’t recognize our SSL certificate, and so couldn’t send results back to the GC or communicate via Mobile Learn.

Putting the proper intermediate certificate back in place, and both Safe Assign and Mobile Learn are working again.

Unfortunately, there is no way for existing Safe Assign submissions to be placed back into the Grade Center. The only option is to either grade them manually and transcribe the grades into the Grade Center, or have the student resubmit their papers (which may get flagged 100% for having been previously submitted). There’s no good solution, only different levels of bad.

Spread the word…

Sorry for all the problems this caused.

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Maintenance 4/13/12

By Glen Parker | Published: April 13, 2012

The IT Networking Group is moving the database into a new router, which requires a restart of Blackboard. This should be a very quick update, and Blackboard should be down about 15 minutes.

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Response to Email from Canvas about merging accounts

By Glen Parker | Published: January 9, 2012

USF Member,

A few days ago an email was accidentally sent to you with a message reading

“An account has been created for you at usflearn.instructure.com, but you already have a Canvas account. If you would like to merge them together, please visit the following url:……”

USF IT regularly evaluates new products to ensure we are making the best use of resources. Recently we began evaluation of a new Learning Management System called Canvas by Instructure. Part of our evaluation involved loading user data into the system, and this resulted in the email being sent.

You do not need to take any action with regards that email. Please delete it and do not give it another thought. We apologize for the confusion.

Sincerely,

USF IT

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Grade Center problems overnight

By Glen Parker | Published: August 30, 2011

Overnight, a database query related to the Blackboard grade center went awry. This had the effect of blocking all other queries that tried to access the Grade Center. From roughly 1am – 9am the Grade Center and Grades were unavailable. Blackboard was otherwise unaffected. This did not impact the submission of tests or the discussion board. No data was lost as a result of this error.

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Blackboard maintenance, August 12th

By Glen Parker | Published: August 11, 2011

Tonight we’re applying an operating system patch of our database server. In order to patch that server requires a system reboot, so Blackboard has to be down for the duration.

Solaris 10 with patch 141444-09 and without patch 142900-02 causes interface failure in IP Multipathing.

The interface failed because the ICMP probe replies for e1000g2 are received on e1000g1 instead of e1000g2.

The current fix for this is kernel patch, 142909-17. Unfortunately we’ll have to have some downtime to reboot for this patch.

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Error when creating new Discussion Board threads in certain situation.

By Glen Parker | Published: August 2, 2011

There is currently an issue when accessing a discussion board forum
through a content area and creating a new thread, an “The specified
object was not found.” is given. If the user access the discussion
board though the content area but replies to a thread they do not
receive an error. If the user access the discussion board directly,
though a link in the course menu or tools area, and creates a new
thread they do not receive the error. You can direct students to
access the discussion board forum through the ‘tools’ link in the
course menu or make the ‘discussions’ link available to students.

In short, if the instructor links directly to a discussion forum
though a content area and a user goes to create a new thread they
receive an error.

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Known issues with Blackboard and OS X Lion

By Glen Parker | Published: July 26, 2011

A brief note up front, Lion is not supported by Blackboard, and likely won’t ever be
supported for 9.0.x, the version we are currently on. Using Lion with Blackboard at this point is an “at your own risk” proposition until December 2011 at the soonest.

In Lion, scroll bars are now dynamic. This means that you only see a scroll indicator when you are actually scrolling a page. Otherwise, the content fills the screen.

Grade Center
This causes two problems for Blackbaord Grade Center (and probably other Blackboard list elements)

1)
There’s no indication that there are 200 students in this course.

2) Gestural scrolling doesn’t work with the Grade Center. If you try to swipe up/down or left/right, it won’t scroll the grade center, rather it will scroll the entire page, including the unfortunate behavior when swiping right of returning to the previous page (a back
button behavior). The only way to scroll in Lion is to click where the scrollbars would be, and hope you hit the 2-3 pixels reserved for scrolling.

In Safari, the right two finger swipe gesture goes back one page. This does not happen in Chrome or Firefox.

In Chrome, you can see the scroll bars always, but you cannot swipe to scroll within the grade center, you still need to click to scroll the grade center.

Also, in both browsers, there are no longer arrow click elements to scroll left/right. You need to click & drag the scroll bar, or click on the right side of the scroll bar to scroll right.

In Firefox, vertical scrolling works, but both the grade center and the whole page scroll at the same time, so it’s very distracting. horizontal scrolling doesn’t work, need to click the scrollbar as in other browsers. Actually Horizontal scroll works in FF but only if you are hovered over the scroll bar. Hovering over the scroll bar also allows for vertical movement in the GC without the whole thing moving.

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Blackboard Support for Firefox 5, Chrome

By Glen Parker | Published: June 29, 2011

The following is notice from Blackboard regarding Firefox & Chrome. In summary, new versions will be tested internally by Blackboard, and a known issues list will be maintained and updated as compatibility issues arise. Blackboard will no longer guarantee the compatibility of future versions of these browsers.

Technically speaking, this is also true of Internet Explorer and Safari. All browsers are subject to regular updates, and it’s not feasible to test every release that comes out.

Last week Firefox 5 was released hot on the heels of Firefox 4. There has been a lot of chatter about Mozilla’s rapid release strategy and their focus on the individual user over enterprise needs. That puts Blackboard and Universities into a difficult position to stay current and ensure Blackboard performs well with the newest Firefox browser. The same situation is true with Chrome. The best we can do is inform you of the compatibility issues between the browser and Blackboard. For Firefox 5, we are conducting testing and in a few weeks will communicate any Known Issues. The important thing is that we will accept problems on the browser today.

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