SPAM

You may have noticed in increase in spam in your Inbox. This is due to the expiration of "Energize Updates" on our current anti-spam system. We are hoping to implement the new system within weeks, and therefore don't want to pay the annual subscription renewal. Actual percentage of spam increase has been negligible, but some users are getting 5-10 per day instead of only one per day. We still block most spam. Our ratio of spam blocked to email allowed is 10:1. You can see in the graph below that the amount of spam (red) is still being blocked, and is much greater than the number of messages being allowed (in green).

Click for a larger image.

Internet planned outage Mon., Mar. 24, 4:30 PM

At 4:30 today all internet services will be down for maintenance. We are installing a new filter to handle (among other things) the spam that we have all been receiving this past week.

Systems Affected:
During this outage you will not be able to:
-Use any internet services whatsoever from inside the district.
-Email from outside the district.
-Powerschool from outside the district.
-Citrix
-District web pages other than www.oregonsd.org

Duration:
This outage will start at 4:30 PM today (Mar 24) and last for approximately 1 hour.

Actions needed to be taken by you:
If you are using any of the affected system at the time of the outage you are prone to data loss. Please log off of any affected system before 4:30 PM.

Monthly review- March 22, 2008

IT Monthly Review

March 22, 2008

The past month in IT:

• The IT department has closed 295 helpdesk tickets.
• Received word that NWEA has released TestTaker 6 for MAP testing. In related news, Verona started their annual testing and had the same problems we did last year. This does not bode well for our tests, but perhaps the new version of TestTaker will help.
• Installed the demo version of Lightspeed Total Traffic Control to test for deployment.
• Re-refined the parent mass-mailer system for approvers to make it smoother. Still have a few bugs to work out, though.
• Revised PowerSchool backup scheme to give us monthly historical archives in addition to disaster recovery restoration points.
• Test implemented a Groupwise-based calendar for reserving the DSO North Conference Room.
• Ordered equipment for the Technology Integration Program (TIP) requests.
• Drafted 2008-09 budget for IT department.
• Chose specs for standard desktop to be ordered this summer.
• Performed troubleshooting on the OMS server to solve poor performance.
• Migrated all printers to a new server to reduce the dependencies between email and print queues.
• Dealt with a slight increase in spam received by users due to expiration of "Energize Updates" on our current anti-spam system. We are hoping to implement the new system within weeks, and therefore don't want to pay the annual subscription renewal. Actual percentage of spam increase has been negligible, but some users are getting 5-10 per day instead of only one per day. We still block most spam. Our ratio of spam blocked to email allowed is 10:1. You can see in the graph below that the amount of spam (red) is still being blocked, and is much greater than the number of messages being allowed (in green).
• Dealt with systems that are still not compliant with the new DST change schedule.
• Implemented SAML single sign-on for Google Apps domains.

The past month of the Information and Technology Literacy Team:

• Developed budget for 2008-09.
• Started planning for the logistics of actually implementing the ITLT Professional Development Plan.
• Did some on-the-fly keyboarding research to recommend to administration.
• Brainstormed possible ways to proactively deal with the migration to digital TV signals, which is resulting in scarcity of analog AV equipment we use.
• Coordinated our involvement with the SACs to incorporate ITL outcomes into curriculum.
• Reviewed summer course offerings.
  

In the past month, Jon:

• Was principal for a day at OMS. Twice.
• Assisted with the A-team Tier 1 Indicator culture subcommittee
• Participated in planning the WiscNet Future Technologies Conference
• Researched keyboarding best practice and made recommendations to the administrative team
  
• Created an A-Team wiki
• Presented the ITLT Professional Development Plan to the board
• Assisted with the transition of a long term sub TRT at RCI.
  

Spring break

We will be running with reduced staff over spring break (March 21-30). Two techs will be in training all week, and we have a few vacation days among us. Hopefully it will be quiet, since no students and few staff will actually be here.

Budget crunch

Working on the 08-09 budget is getting tough. We have to replace 392 computers this summer- more than double what we did last summer. Apparently, five years ago we bought a whole lot of computers, so now they need to be replaced. We anticipated this last year and pre-emptively replaced about thirty more than we needed to after only four years of service to reduce the number being replaced this year. But 392 is still huge. It's putting a strain on our budget. I've already anticipated the unit cost savings from last year, and cut non-essential items from the budget, but I'm still about $100,000 overbudget. That works out to the cost of about 200 computers, so I guess that makes sense. 

The real downside is that it takes away from other initiatives, like wireless networks, LCD projectors, and an inline UPS for the data center. Perhaps these will have to be shifted to the building budgets. Well, not the UPS. I'll have to save that for a future year. 

Zach had a good idea, which was to earmark a large amount of money every five years for the "computer bubble," and then other years we make a large cyclical purchase, such as the inline UPS, network switches, or wireless network in a building. Assuming we replace 20% of our computers every year, that's around 300 computers. Compared to the nearly 400 computers we are replacing this year, that's an extra $100,000 (at today's price of around $500/unit).

Sigh....

Evaluating new system for spam filtering, web filtering, packet-shaping, etc.etc.

Got spam? We are evaluating a new system to prevent spam. It also performs packet-shaping bandwidth management, web filtering and reporting, and IM filtering. It will replace multiple systems, give us better reporting and management capabilities, and cost less.

We are installing a demo this week. It looks great in the demo (don't they all), so we're hoping it works well. If so, your spam should go down.

Keep your fingers crossed.

Principal for a day

I was out of the tech office today, filling in as the principal at the middle school. It was "exhilarating" as Chris promised, but I didn't get much of my normal job done. 

The clocks were messed up due to the new DST change date, and the company that services them lost the technician who normally works with our systems, so we have to re-orient a new person to our system. 

Impending nightmare of MAP testing

We did MAP testing last fall, and it was a nightmare. Horrible technical problems. Teachers in tears because they were futilely trying to get students logged in. NWEA tech support was barely any help. They told us to turn off anti-virus on our servers, which we did, but it only helped a little. I consulted the neighboring districts that use MAP and asked for help. We finally decided that the problem must be that our servers were not powerful enough for it. At the time, NWEA's system requirements for the server were a joke. Pentium III 1.3 GHz with 256 MB RAM, I believe. 

Anyway, we limped along and then went to the Board to ask for contingency funds to buy a dedicated server (we had been running each instance on a building file server). We got it, and have the server ready. 

But now that the spring testing window is here, other districts (who wisely test only once a year), are experiencing the same issues we did, in spite of successfully testing a year ago.

Here are some descriptions of the problems:

We just started yesterday, and we are experiencing some issues that we didn't have last year. Slowness to load, slowness between questions, timeouts and kids getting booted out of the test. If anything, our infrastructure is faster this year than last year. We didn't have any of these problems last spring. 

Do your proctors set up testing areas before the kids come in? Ours have always done that without problem, and this time we had reports where it would appear to time out. They had it on the screen that says "start test". We never had issues with this in the past, and NWEA says there is no time out set.

One proposed solution was

The other thing that we have done so that we don't bring the server to it's knees is stagger the start of the tests between schools and labs within the school.  Even if you only wait 5 minutes it can make all the difference.  From what I've gathered from the MAP tech support is that during the first five minutes of the students taking a test there is a spike of traffic between the work station and server.  Once the students get through those first minutes it relaxes a bit and a new group of students can get on. 

We tried this last year, and it did help somewhat, but the NWEA support people I talked to said it should have nothing to do with it. 

I am very worried about our spring MAP testing experience. 

Middle server acting really slow

The MIDDLE server is responding really slowly today. Not sure why, yet, but we see it on the server end as well as the user end.

UPDATE
Doug found the possible reason- two instances of Apache, only one of which will unload. Server load is back down to 10-20% utilization instead of the 50% it was at earlier. Server will be rebooted tonight to fix the remaining stuck Apache instance.