INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY SERVICES
March 2007
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Announcements from the Bulletin, Today, Notification-L
03/30/07, 1600grand Portal Is Coming!
Macalester's new Web portal, 1600grand, is coming April 2. The portal
will serve as your "front door" to many online resources including
functions of our new College administrative system (Banner) such as
course registration, advising and grading, viewing pay stubs and benefit
information, viewing vacation and medical leave accumulation, and (in
the future) accessing purchasing and budgeting data.
Web Services and ITS are offering drop-in sessions to introduce you to
the new portal and to help you configure your portal pages so that they
will be most useful to you. Sessions are open to anyone - students,
faculty, staff - and are scheduled from 11:00 AM to noon, Monday April 2 in
Humanities 302 and from 11:00 AM to noon, Wednesday April 4 in Humanities
302. There is no need to pre-register for these sessions. Additional
drop-in sessions will be scheduled if there is enough demand.
Appointments are also available Monday and Wednesday mornings throughout
the rest of the semester for faculty and staff who would like personal,
one-on-one assistance with portal configuration in their offices. To
sign up please contact Sara Suelflow, Director of Web Services, at
suelflow@macalester.edu or
x6307. Other times and days are available upon request with advance
notice, either for an individual session or a group session for your
department or office.
Training materials and documentation will also be available within the
portal itself and on the ITS Web site, for those that prefer
self-training. [Bulletin]
03/30/07, Got Firefox 2?
In order to take advantage of all that our new 1600grand portal has to
offer, including integration with our new College administrative system
(Banner), you will need to run the latest version (2) of our campus
supported Web browser, Firefox. To determine what version of Firefox you
have loaded on your computer, run Firefox and then from the Firefox menu
(Macintosh) or the Help menu (Windows) select About Mozilla Firefox.
Look for Firefox/2.0.x at the end of the block of text. If you are not
running version 2, you can download it at www.macalester.edu/firefox.
If you have questions about upgrading to Firefox 2, please contact the
ITS Help Desk at helpdesk@macalester.edu or x6525. [Bulletin]
03/23/07, The Faculty Information System is
Changing - Learn More Over Lunch
With the change over to Banner, the Faculty Information System will be
changing as of the first week of April, so you will need to use the new
system to help your students register for classes a in a couple of
weeks! To help you prepare, the CST, the Registrar and ITS have
scheduled two demonstration / Q&A sessions for March 27 and 29. Come
have lunch on us, and learn about how the new system works!
The duplicate sessions (come to one or the other) are 11:50 AM - 12:50
PM Tuesday and Thursday, March 27 and 29, Olin-Rice room 350. Jayne
Niemi and folks from Information Technology Services will be available
to show you how the new system works and answer your questions. [Bulletin]
03/23/07, Webmail Time Error
Because of a Daylight Saving Time (DST) issue, OCS Webmail is still one
hour behind. Messages viewed in Webmail appear to have been sent and
received one hour earlier than they actually were. ITS is aware of this
problem and is working with Oracle on a solution. [Bulletin, also
3/27; Today 3/23, 3/26, 3/27.]
03/13/07, E-Mail Server Restart Tonight After 9:00 PM
Because of the Daylight Saving Time change, the e-mail server needs to
be restarted tonight, Tuesday, March 13 2007. We will be restarting it
sometime after 9:00 PM, and the system will be down for less than one
hour. E-mail arriving while the system is restarting will be queued and
delivered when the system is back up. Please send any questions or
comments to: fines@macalester.edu. Thank you!
[Notification-L]
03/09/07, The Times They Are A-Changin'
You may remember frequent articles in this space warning of potential
problems with Corporate Time online calendars caused by this year's new
Daylight Saving Time dates (DST begins Sunday, March 11). As promised,
ITS staff patched our Corporate Time calendar server on February 9. Full
information can be found at www.macalester.edu/its/daylightsaving/.
If you did not print your Corporate Time calendar and revise meetings
per our directions, you may see some meetings off by an hour between
March 11 and April 1, and then again October 28 through November 4.
Palm Users:
If you use a Palm OS handheld, a patch is available to update daylight
saving time on it at www.palm.com/us/support/downloads/dst_palmos.html.
Daylight Saving Time and Public Clocks
Facilities Management will be changing clocks in public spaces over the
weekend and using the United States official time. You are encouraged to
set your clocks and time clocks to that time and it can be found at
www.time.gov. [Bulletin, also 3/13]
03/06/07, Call for Proposals: ACTC Classrooms of the Future Symposium
Classrooms of the Future Symposium
May 22, 2007
Hamline University
CALL FOR PROPOSALS
The Classrooms of the Future Committee of the Associated Colleges of the
Twin Cities (ACTC) announces our Call for Proposals for Classrooms of
the Future XIII. This year's theme is "Teaching, Learning, and
Technology: In That Order."
The COTF Review Committee invites all faculty and staff to submit
proposals for the conference sessions and the post-conference workshops.
You are invited to talk with your colleagues about:
03/06/07, Spring Break Seminars
The Library and ITS are sponsoring a number of spring break training
seminars on Tuesday, March 13, on topics of interest to faculty and
staff. Topics include a preview of Microsoft Office 2007, an
introduction to the new campus Web portal, and a look at some cool Web
tools. For more information and to sign up, visit
www.macalester.edu/infoservices/training/springbreak/.
[Bulletin, also 3/9]
03/02/07, Banner Maintenance Update
Posted 7:51 AM
Maintenance has been completed successfully on the development server.
You should be able to login into QUAL and EUTR without any problems.
That's the good news. The bad news is that we are having some issues
with our production server. That is where our production database
(PROD) resides. The server went down around 9:00 PM yesterday, Thursday
March 1, and we have been trying to bring it back up since then.
We will keep you informed as we learn more about the problem.
If you have any questions, please feel free to e-mail Ramón Rentas at rentas@macalester.edu.
Posted 10:47 AM
Latest update:
Once again, let me begin with the good news. The production server is
back up and running. The not-so-good news is that all the patches need
to be reapplied.
Please e-mail Ramón Rentas at rentas@macalester.edu if you have any questions.
Posted 2:09 PM
Last night, during the installation of one of the patches, the root
partition on the production server got corrupted. This caused the system to
go down. Today around 10:45 AM our IBM consultant was able to bring the
system back up. After that he was able to reinstall all the patches
successfully.
However, we are still having some problems. We noticed that all the
files under /usr/local/bin were gone. Those files are needed to start
the database (PROD). We are in the process of trying to recover those
files from backup.
Posted 5:43 PM
As of 4:51 PM, both the production system and database (PROD) are up and
running. Please accept our apologies for any inconvenience this
unpredicted event may have caused you. [Staff-notification-L]
02/28/07, Banner Maintenance 3/1
Banner will be offline for maintenance and patching from 5:00 PM to
12:00 midnight tomorrow, Thursday March 1. If you have questions,
please call Ramón Rentas at x.6633. [Staff-Notification-L]
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