INFORMATION SERVICES
October 2005
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Announcements from the Bulletin, Today, Notification-L
10/25/05, A Telecomm Tip
Have you heard of 211? 211 is the United Way's Community Help Line,
which can also be found on-line at www.unitedway.org. 211 provides
callers with information about, and referrals to, human services for
everyday needs and in times of crisis. These include:
10/21/05, CARS System to be Scrapped! Administrative Systems Project
[This is a campus-wide announcement, rather than an Information Services
posting. However, given the scope and impact of the project - not least on CIT - it will be archived
here as well as in other venues. Ed.]
Have you noticed a few administrative folks looking like deer caught in
the headlights lately? How about extra traffic heading across Snelling
Ave. to the third floor of the Lampert Building? Or, have you noticed a
few administrative offices closed at random times lately and groups of
mid-level staff managers coming out of meetings looking like some of the
things they've wanted to improve or change for years might finally be on
the move? If you have noticed these and other signs, you have picked up
on the first indications that the new administrative software
implementation project is in full swing!
The Macalester community is invited to attend a meeting that will
introduce Macalester's administrative systems project, "Effectively
Linking Macalester," from 12:00 noon to 1:00 PM Wednesday, November 2, in the John
B. Davis Lecture Hall. Refreshments will be provided.
It was recently reported in the Bulletin that a full-time project
manager for the college's administrative systems implementation project
had been appointed. A Project Steering Team has now also begun work on
the project to implement the new administrative software system, Banner,
purchased from Sungard SCT®. These college employees come from many of
our administrative departments and are working on a project that will
take 30 months or so to complete.
Banner is a strategic systems project selected by the management of the
college to better position the institution for the future. The Project
Steering Team has been empowered by the Board of Trustees and President
Brian Rosenberg to be the decision-making authority for the project.
Macalester is joining six existing Sungard SCT® client colleges in
Minnesota, all of whom will have implemented this product.
This is a once-in-a-career opportunity to do something truly great to
transform the operation of the college. Every once in a while, all of
the inefficiencies and annoying disconnects get a light shined on them
so they can be corrected, and better ways of getting and using
information, processing transactions and serving people become possible.
The Banner Project (a/k/a "Effectively Linking Macalester" or "Operation
ELM",) is the vehicle by which Macalester will continuously improve
these processes and transactions.
The success of the project will require the full cooperation and best
effort of each person asked to participate with the implementation. It
will also require the patience of everyone as administrative personnel
may be pulled away from their normal jobs for extended periods of time
to install the system and shape the workflows to meet the needs of those
they serve. One effect of this effort may be occasional disruptions:
offices may be closed for short periods of time, response times may be
temporarily lengthened and there may be short-term computer
interruptions. These are all short-term sacrifices that we need to make
in order to improve our administrative processes and position the
college for superior operation and performance for the next generation
of students, staff and faculty who will become part of the Macalester
community.
The members of the Project Steering Team are: David Wheaton, Treasurer's
Office, chair; Chuck Standfuss, project manager; Kate Abbott,
Advancement; Nancy Eastham, Business Services; Maureen Englund, Business
Services; Jim Hoppe, Student Affairs; Patti Koehler, Admissions; Brian
Lindeman, Financial Aid; Jayne Niemi, Registrar; Jeane Olson, Bursar;
Ramon Rentas, Computing and Information Technology; and Doug Rosenberg,
Business Services. Many employees in all administrative offices will be
involved in the project to varying degrees. Again, we ask for your
patience for the immediate future if service to you is not meeting the
high standards that you have come to expect. The long-term goal, of
course, is to improve all services, so the temporary "pain" will
eventually be worth the long-term "gain." The Project Steering Team
looks forward to receiving your full support in this effort.
Please direct any questions regarding the project to Project Manager
Chuck Standfuss at standfuss@macalester.edu or x6911. [Bulletin, also 10/25]
10/18/05, Guidelines and Best Practices for Copyright
There are several means that faculty have available to them to
distribute information and media (videos, films, DVDs) to students
enrolled in their courses. You may be using Moodle, Course Folders,
eReserves, course Web pages, or even e-mail. Are you aware of how
copyright law pertains to information you distribute this way? Have you
considered whether the concept of "fair use" governs information
conveyed through Moodle (or any electronic method) and how far "fair
use" actually goes? Have you considered whether you and the College may
be liable for copyright infringement?
The Copyright Clearance Center (copyright.com) has prepared a brief
and cogent guide to best practices for copyright compliance when using
course management systems, or sharing content with students via other
electronic means. It may be downloaded, in Adobe's PDF format, at
www.copyright.com/media/pdfs/Using-Course-Management-Systems.pdf.
A link to this document is also available in the Teachers Lounge of Moodle.
As mentioned in the document, the Copyright Compliance Center
facilitates obtaining permissions. The library has an account with the
CCC and provides a service to obtain copyright permissions. Please see
www.
macalester.edu/library/copyright/index.html. If you have questions
about this service or copyright, please contact Janet Sietmann, x6545. [Bulletin, also 10/21]
10/18/05, A Telecomm Tip
Want to immediately respond to a co-worker's or student's voicemail
message? After listening to a voicemail message from an on-campus
person, press 8, record your reply, press #, and follow the prompts.
If you hang up and do not press the # key after recording your response,
you did not respond.
If you have any phone or voice mail questions that you'd like to see
answered here, call Telecommunications at x6566. [Bulletin, also 10/21]
10/18/05, HRC Adds Large-format Scanner
In addition to the slide scanner and regular-format scanners already
available there, the Humanities Resource Center is now equipped
with a scanner that can handle items as large as 11.7" x 17".
This scanner is ideal for capturing large sections of maps,
big books and similar imagery. It is available for use by
all students, faculty and staff at no charge. If you have
questions please contact Tom Browne at x.6336. [Bulletin, also 10/21]
10/18/05, Minnesota Reflections
Macalester is a contributor to the Minnesota Reflections, the first
project of the Minnesota Digital Library, now open for public viewing at
reflections.mndigital.org.
"Minnesota Reflections brings more than 5,000 photographs, postcards and
stereographs of Minnesota from before 1909, contributed by more than 50
cultural heritage organizations, to people around the world. Each
picture in 'Minnesota Reflections' is a digital copy of an image from
the early days of the state, accompanied by information about the
image."
"Minnesota Reflections was created by the Minnesota Digital Library
Coalition, with funding support from a Library Services and Technology
Act grant from the Minnesota Department of Education's State Library
Services and School Technology division." [Bulletin, also 10/21]
10/14/05, Power Problem in the Data Room
There was a power problem in the Data Room today at 11:30 AM caused by an
overloaded circuit tripping a breaker. The following systems were all
instantly shut off, causing them to be completely unavailable:
10/11/05, New Resource - FRANCIS
FRANCIS is a new resource that includes foreign language materials for
the social sciences (especially economics) and humanities. A multidisciplinary
database, FRANCIS provides access to a wide range of materials including
journals, books, conference reports, book chapters and dissertations.
The time period covered includes 1984 to the present. FRANCIS has been
acquired to expand our access to international materials. See
http://0-eureka.rlg.org.clicnet4.clic.edu/Eureka/zgate2.prod?ACTION=INIT&LIMFIL=FRA. If you have
questions about this service, please contact the Library Reference Desk at
x.6618. [Bulletin, also 10/14]
10/11/05, A Telecomm Tip
Have a Telecomm question? Check out the Macalester Telecommunications
Web site at http://www.macalester.edu/Telecom/. You can also find it via
the online directory, linked from Administrative Offices and linked from
both the Information Services and CIT Web sites. We hope you find it
informative. If you have any questions, find any misprints, or don't
find the information you are looking for, please contact
Telecommunications at x6566. [Bulletin, also 10/14]
10/10/05, Brief Internet Outage Today at 12:00 PM
The connection to the Internet will be out for a few minutes (less than
5) today at 12:00 PM. We have updated some software on the Packetshaper
unit, and need to restart it for the update to take effect.
The Packetshaper is an appliance for managing the Internet connection.
Among other things, it allows us to prioritize traffic on the connection
so no individual or program can dominate how the connection is used.
Here is a link to Packeteer's page on bandwidth control, for the
curious.
Thank you. [Notification-L]
10/04/05, Your 2005-2006 Employee Directory is On Its Way!
The 2005-2006 Employee Directory will soon be in your mailbox. There is
ONE directory per employee. Directories are not given to students or
anyone outside of the College. Every effort has been made to include
complete and correct information. If you note an error or omission,
please contact Human Resources at x6480. Please properly recycle your
2004-2005 directory. [Bulletin, also 9/30]
10/04/05, Information Services Software Classes Available
The Library and CIT have teamed up to offer a variety of training
sessions on various software packages and research methods. These
sessions are completely free and are open to all Macalester faculty,
staff and students. Sessions include creating Web pages/graphics with
Dreamweaver and Photoshop, an overview of OCS Webmail and a session on
safe computing practices (among other topics). You can check out the full
listing of session being offered at
www.macalester.edu/infoservices/training/. [Bulletin, also 9/30]
10/03/05, Mail Bomb
We were subjected to a mail bomb attack for about two to three hours this
afternoon. A "mail bomb" is when an e-mail system is sent an extremely
large number of junk messages, for the purpose of disabling or crashing
the system. The inundation of so many junk messages causes delivery of
legitimate e-mail to be delayed. The mail bomb is over, and you should
have your mail now.
We're already taking a few steps this semester to prevent further
attacks. One thing we're doing is implementing an intrusion detection
system, which helps to identify suspicious or malicious traffic. Having
a program tell the difference between a mail bomb, and just a busy day
for e-mail is difficult, but this system should help us do that. I
patched our qmail server so that it should handle large message queues
more efficiently (processing the junk mail more efficiently means it
will process legitimate mail more efficiently too), and I also patched
it so that it will be more picky about what mail it accepts in the first
place. I also have a way to make these attacks have a much lower
overall impact (i.e. not delay your e-mail so much), but it will take a few
days to implement that. [Notification-L]
10/01/05, OCS System Status, 10/1, 11:00 AM
Yesterday I covered the hardware architecture of the system [see update
from 9/30/05]. The remaining question was, If we haven't had
any hardware failures, why have we had problems?
We've had problems because of a configuration problem on the Mid-Tier.
There are three tiers to the system, the Data Store Tier, the
Infrastructure Tier and the Mid-Tier. We haven't had any trouble with
the first two, but on the Mid-Tier problems started after configuring
SSL. I really wish that we had never tried to configure SSL on this
system. Up until that point, I was very happy with how the migration
had progressed.
SSL is an acronym for Secure Sockets Layer, which is the standard way
for providing secure communication between user's computers and web
servers. If you're at a web site and the start of the address reads
"https://" instead of just "http://,"
it means the communication between your computer is encrypted.
Configuring SSL was very difficult and we had many problems getting it
configured correctly. The 'we' I refer to is myself [Ted Fines], Oracle
engineers, and the consulting firm we are working with. As new users of
OCS, we (that's back to the CIT 'we') are not about to try to do a major
configuration change without research and assistance. But it caused a
lot of problems anyway.
Even after we thought we got SSL right, the changes required for SSL
caused new problems on the system that hadn't appeared before. Among
the new problems were an inability to send any attachment in Webmail,
and a number of broken links on the portal and Web interface. For
instance, the link to Webmail on the portal was not updated and still
tried to direct users to the pre-SSL address, which no longer worked.
So with our consulting firm and Oracle we worked through those problems,
which I believe have all been taken care of. But the most significant
problem of instability remains. This too cropped up since configuring
SSL. I'd frankly like to just uninstall SSL but have been told by
Oracle that it's not possible - the changes made are too pervasive. Even
after a couple weeks of trying to figure out exactly what is causing the
problem, no one has been able to get me a definitive answer as to the
cause.
So what now? A randomly unstable system is completely unacceptable of
course. What you want to do is get mad. You want to threaten someone,
or get someone here NOW to just fix the problem. That's what I'd like
to do. Threats feel good for the seconds while they're vocalized. But
after that you probably can't back it up, and you're left with a soured
relationship from the party from which you still need help. So more
practically, I do this:
1. Implement a workaround so end-users are affected as little as
possible.
2. Work the problem / Explore alternative solutions.
The workaround we've got going right now is basic, but it works: we
restart all three tiers. If we do that, the system stays up and stable
for several days. A three-tier restart was done on Monday, September
26th, in the evening. It was done again on Wednesday 9/28 just after
midnight. We'll do it again on Sunday night, 10/2. The result of this
is that while Monday 9/26 was terrible, after Monday night, Tuesday
through Saturday (and probably tomorrow, 10/2) we were still able to
provide a stable system. My point in saying this here is not to say
that this level of service is OK for the long term, but that the
workaround service now is better than people tend to think. With the
workaround, we can now provide normal, stable e-mail service by
continuing to restart the tiers at regular intervals during off hours.
Working the problem is just looking at logs, config files, etc. to try
and find out what is going wrong. That can only go on for so long since
ultimately you just need it to work and don't want troubleshooting to
become an end unto itself. I don't know who said this, but "Arguing
with an engineer is like wrestling in the mud with a pig. After a while
you realize the pig is enjoying it."
Alternative solutions are more drastic steps, like upgrading the system
to a newer version earlier than planned, or erasing the system and
starting over without SSL. When I say 'erasing' I absolutely do
NOT mean any user data, like e-mail.
To summarize, I still am certain that OCS and the architecture we
planned was the right choice. We're in a bad situation because of the
SSL configuration. I think we have a reasonable workaround to provide
stable service to end users until the problem can be solved. We are
continuing to work the problem. I am looking very hard at upgrading to
the newer release earlier than planned, and steps have been taken toward
doing just that. I will continue to keep the community up to date.
Thank you for your patience and understanding. [Notification-L]
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