Blackboard Down???

The_Minister

I cn't get onto blackboard. It keeps asking me for my external account password.
Anyone any ideas. I need to get onto it

Mushy

Theres been an announcement on Blackboard for near a month now saying it'd be down this weekend.

The_Minister

Oh:o
I never noticed it:o
My bad.

Thanks though. Guess I'm on my own for that essay.

Breezer

It's coming and going, I got it for a short while yesterday.

Tá Mé Gaeilge

The_Minister wrote: »

I cn't get onto blackboard. It keeps asking me for my external account password.
Anyone any ideas. I need to get onto it

You should get in touch with the Communications and IT officer about that- he might be able to help you out:D:D

Mimikyu

This post has been deleted.

remus808

Tá Mé Gaeilge wrote: »

You should get in touch with the Communications and IT officer about that- he might be able to help you out:D:D

LOL.

Owned.

Riamfada

Emailed to me today

Unfortunately the scheduled Blackboard 7 upgrade has been unsuccessful and
we are currently working to restore the Blackboard 6 environment. We
apologise for any inconvenience that this may cause. Please check our
website for updates on when this service will be available again.

remus808

Grimes wrote: »

Emailed to me today

Unfortunately the scheduled Blackboard 7 upgrade has been unsuccessful and
we are currently working to restore the Blackboard 6 environment. We
apologise for any inconvenience that this may cause. Please check our
website for updates on when this service will be available again.

Sweet Jesus.

UCD Admin has gone beyond a joke. Unsuccessful- wtf like? "Sorry it turns out we actually spent the weekend trying to install a pidgeon onto the network, and are attempting to rectify this mistake without harming any poultry"

My bet's on the next scheduled upgrade being during exam season.

spaceman1

It has been down for the past week for me. One day it asks for a password, the next it says it has an error and is responding to slowly.

mloc

It's still down.

Farily poor that they were "unsuccessful" in upgrading, despite taking an entire weekend to do so. Also quite poor that it took them until the last moment to realise they had failed.

One working day with no access to lecture material, assignments, blackboard communications and notifications is pretty serious.

Riamfada

with respect to everyone ...........



......... ive ****in essays due this week and the department will not look kindly on 200 students looking for hard copies of all notes on BB

Dave!

Anybody know if computer science practicals will be on...? I've got Data Structures and Algorithms today at 2pm. Will they just give us a hand-out and have us write out the answers? (they did this before)

Intel

I've got a final maths exam tomorrow, with all the notes on blackboard. Thsi is so frustrating. Does anyone know when BB will be back up or at least if they will give us access to it for a short time? :mad::mad:

Umaro

I'm surprised the boffins in the UCD computing thing didn't plan for such an event and make it easy to rollback to Bb6 if Bb7 started to puff out smoke and yell "danger hugh brady! danger!"

Chakar

Computing Services are not only incompetent but they are also illiterate. I emailed a query to Bb support regarding a problem directly related to Bb but instead they tell me twice to check it with Mozilla Firefox instead of IE 7.0 when it has nothing to do with IE. After I confirmed for the second time that there was no problems with IE 7.0, they haven't emailed me back as of yet.

Stepherunie

I had a pc based exam this morning that was worth 50% of my grade in that course.

Luckily the lectuers running it were tech minded and took over the computer room early and spent an age running round logging some 45 pcs onto a desktop so we'd all have access to the exam.

This is rather a nightmare.

Ballerina

ah the one day i sit down to actually do some work i cant access my notes...ugh

Tom65

Does anyone else have a vision of UCD IT people sitting around on Sunday night around 8pm, then suddenly jumping up and saying "Oh ****! I knew there was something we were supposed to do!". No? Just me then.

Paul Tergat

this is total bs i really need notes...

stull not up but now theres a different logo and it says version 6?

Dave!

They've had an announcement up for about a month chaps... sure, it shouldn't happen, but they gave fairly adequate notice IMO.

Paul Tergat

aye but like they did say just for the weekend no? (i may be wrong on this)

remus808

Yeah, the notified outage was only supposed to be for the weekend. But they screwed up the upgrade somehow and now we're facing downtime until they decide to fix it. A notified outage is fair enough, even it shouldnt happen, but this failure business is stupid.

I started this thread over on the SU, could be of interest. Personally I think the whole affair is a shambles

fatal

well ****ing done again UCD.They have idiots running the place.What are they doing during the summer months when they have all the time in the world to install necessary updates?

kf1920

the blackboard home page loaded for me, then when i went to log in it said there was no account for my log in number! Well done dumbass, they hav outdone themselves again! (Blackboard release 6)

Vorsprung

I'm just getting a primitive looking "Service Unavailable" message.

I presume Blackboard being down has nothing do do with the printers on Library level 3 being down!?

pretty*monster

No guarentee that it'll be back up and running tomorrow yet, but I'm sure we live in hope.

Aquitaine

I can login fine

pretty*monster

Aquitaine wrote: »

I can login fine

no you can't

Waltons

I messed up and forgot to download my notes before the upgrade. Thankfully, I was able to get into it on Friday night and download the extra notes I needed.
As Dave said, they mentioned that there was going to be downtime, so I'm sure most people saw that. It's unfortunate that the downtime has run over but, having some experience with setting up computer gear, I'm not surprised that everything didn't go to plan; it rarely does. I'm not the biggest fan of computer services but I really doubt they're just sitting around not trying to fix the problem.
Since first year my lecturers have advised me to save notes from Blackboard so obviously the system's not the greatest in the best of times. When I managed to get onto it on Friday night it didn't seem any better - granted they would've still been putting it in place. I did, however, notice a good few ads scattered around it for Blackboard related paraphernalia, so maybe the failure is blessing in disguise

I've always preferred moodle anyway

Breezer

It's back. At least the front page is showing, but I can't log in, it keeps telling me my details are incorrect. Anyone else managing to log in yet?

Edit: No no, wait, now the log in form won't load. At least they appear to be working on it.

fatal

Breezer wrote: »

It's back. At least the front page is showing, but I can't log in, it keeps telling me my details are incorrect. Anyone else managing to log in yet?

Edit: No no, wait, now the log in form won't load. At least they appear to be working on it.

gone again.................

Due to unforeseen circumstances access to the Blackboard E-Learning Environment is unavailable this morning.

UCD IT Services are currently working on a resolution and we will post a status update at lunchtime today.

We apologise for any inconvenience that this may cause.

MuddyDog

blackboard is now apparently "Under Construction"

Breezer

It's been "under construction" several times over the weekend. The service has also been "unavailable," the connection has been "closed" and the page simply hasn't been available at times as well. Occasionally it's been working fine, although most of the time when it appears to be our login IDs are seemingly invalid. So I wouldn't set too much store by what you see when you try access it.

I'm more interested to know what time IT services consider "lunchtime" to be, since they're supposed to be posting a status update then. http://www.ucd.ie/itservices/serviceannouncements/index.html#Blackboard_Outage

FionnMatthew

UCD Connect seems to be down now.

Joy.

Stepherunie

Connect is working fine for me....

Vorsprung

A mate of a mate rang up to see what the story was. They tried to upgrade, it didn't work. But somehow/for some reason, they deleted the old Blackboard, so they were Blackboard-less. Seems they're trying to reinstall the old one now.

remus808

Breezer wrote: »

I'm more interested to know what time IT services consider "lunchtime" to be, since they're supposed to be posting a status update then. http://www.ucd.ie/itservices/serviceannouncements/index.html#Blackboard_Outage

"We regret to inform you that IT Services lunchtime takes place from 11am until 6pm on the first tuesday of every november"

:rolleyes:

pretty*monster

karmabass wrote: »

"We regret to inform you that IT Services lunchtime takes place from 11am until 6pm on the first tuesday of every november"

:rolleyes:

To be fair, they're probably having meetings at that time rather than having awesome lunches.

*edit*
ITS hope to have the system back to 'limited service' by tomorrow.

Stepherunie

Yeah i'm loving 'contingency arrangements'. It's getting rather annoying now, we were given lab time to do a project and it's proved useless because the lecturer can't get the project put up on blackboard.

More stress, ah nice one.

Breezer

bigjimthefirst wrote: »

A mate of a mate rang up to see what the story was. They tried to upgrade, it didn't work. But somehow/for some reason, they deleted the old Blackboard, so they were Blackboard-less. Seems they're trying to reinstall the old one now.

Does this mean the data will all be gone until the lecturers upload it again (i.e. never, since this is Prof. Bannigan I'm worried about)?

breadmonkey

EDIT:Breezer got there ahead of me.

Stepherunie

Breezer wrote: »

Does this mean the data will all be gone until the lecturers upload it again (i.e. never, since this is Prof. Bannigan I'm worried about)?

I presume all the info would have been backed up to import onto blackboard 7 so hopefuly *crosses fingers* they should be able to just put all that info back onto bb6

Breezer

Stepherunie wrote: »

I presume all the info would have been backed up to import onto blackboard 7 so hopefuly *crosses fingers* they should be able to just put all that info back onto bb6

I presumed that something this major and potentially disruptive wouldn't be done during mid terms - let's hope your presuming is better than mine!

Stepherunie

I presume I'm being somewhat presumptuous in my notion that someone in UCD is on top of these things. Ah well.

OT: Bannigan get's crankier by the year - he was so rude to one of my lecturers the other day, treated her like a school girl!

irlrobins

bigjimthefirst wrote: »

But somehow/for some reason, they deleted the old Blackboard, so they were Blackboard-less.

What a fuck up. If you're upgrading to a new system the ideal way of doing it is to setup a test environment that is a mirror image of the current environment and then apply the upgrade to the test environment. After lots of successful testing of the upgrade process to test environment, the upgrade is approved.

You then apply the upgrade to the live environment. AFTER you've ensured that a) you have all data backed up and b) a viable means of rolling back in the event of a failure.

Wonder where UCD went wrong. A rather embarrassing and painful situation at the mo it would seem. You would also have to question the decision approving such an upgrade taking place coming up to one of the busiest times of the year. Upgrades like these should be done outside of term time.

Breezer

irlrobins wrote: »

What a fuck up. If you're upgrading to a new system the ideal way of doing it is to setup a test environment that is a mirror image of the current environment and then apply the upgrade to the test environment. After lots of successful testing of the upgrade process to test environment, the upgrade is approved.

You then apply the upgrade to the live environment. AFTER you've ensured that a) you have all data backed up and b) a viable means of rolling back in the event of a failure.

Wonder where UCD went wrong. A rather embarrassing and painful situation at the mo it would seem. You would also have to question the decision approving such an upgrade taking place coming up to one of the busiest times of the year. Upgrades like these should be done outside of term time.

But all that would make sense. This is UCD. Broaden your horizons.

Stepherunie

Heh Heh,

Maybe by getting rid of bb for a while they're hoping we'll all develop either photographic memories or learn telepathically so they don't have put put blackboard back up thus saving them yet more money?????

Riamfada

it dosnt matter. UCD will never speak anything but good of itself. There has been no decent information to the students regarding this outage and it has gone on far to long now to be acceptable.

Previous mistakes made by UCD have been irritations however this disaster, the week thousands of students have essays due, and require access to Blackboard is a disgrace. Already departments are handing out extensions while others refuse to provide hard copies of informations (and who can blame them).


And will they ever make amends for this .... i eagerly await my next update from the presidents office informing me of the success of this administration.

Personally a call for resignation would be appropriate.

G


edit: just received by staff

IT Services wrote:

"Dear Colleagues,

The following is an update on the current status of the Blackboard service.
We are continuing to work on restoring the full Blackboard service however
we anticipate by mid Wednesday morning to be in a position to offer limited
access to staff members only. Access to this service will be restricted to
on Campus and from staff offices.".

Downloading facility for staff available. It seems that for the students it will be down for alot longer

Dave!

F*ckin hell... there's some serious apes employed on the admin side of UCD.

breadmonkey

Hopefully they'll have it back up and running just in time to take it down again a week before the exams.