Author Archives: Glen Parker

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. ———— 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 [...]
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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 [...]
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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 [...]
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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 [...]
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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 [...]
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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 [...]
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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 [...]
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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 [...]
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