Free anti-virus, anti-malware for Windows

Microsoft has just released a free anti-virus product called Security Essentials for Windows computers. Almost everyone knows that they should have anti-virus software installed, but not everybody does it. If the cost was keeping you from buying anti-virus software, this free version could be just what you need.

See http://www.microsoft.com/security_essentials/

Update- PowerSchool planned outage Thursday, 10/1, 5-9 PM

PowerSchool will be unavailable on Thursday, October 1, from 5-9 PM so that we can correct some configuration issues which caused Tuesday morning's unplanned outage.

Teachers must be logged out of PowerTeacher prior to 5:00 PM or else risk losing data. Parents and students will simply see a "not available" message during this period.

Please plan accordingly. Thank you.

PowerSchool is back online

PowerSchool is back online. Many thanks to Lynn for working on it starting at 4 AM. The issue was resolved by Pearson Technical Support, and we are making changes to prevent the root cause from recurring.

Thanks for your patience.

If you get meeting invitations that are an hour off....

If your Google Apps Calendar seems to get getting invitations that are the wrong time, it may be on the wrong time zone. Try re-setting your time zone.

To do this:

1. Get into Google Calendar
2. Click on Settings
3. In the Timezone section, click the drop-down menu and select the Central Time Zone that's at the bottom of the list. You have to do this even if it already says you are in the Central Time Zone because apparently there are two of them.

The way to check this is to look at your Google Calendar and see if there is a small red line on today's date that indicates the correct current time. If it's accurate, you're good to go. If it's an hour off, go select the other Central Time Zone.

gmail service disruption

Google posted this message at about 9:29 AM this morning:

"We're aware of a problem with Google Mail affecting a small subset of users. The affected users are unable to access Google Mail, but we've provided a workaround below. We will provide an update by September 24, 2009 10:29:00 AM UTC-5 detailing when we expect to resolve the problem. Please note that this resolution time is an estimate and may change.

You can access Gmail via IMAP"

Changes to Google Docs that are publicly shared with the whole world

Google Apps has informed us of some important changes around published documents, spreadsheets, and presentations.

In a few weeks, documents, spreadsheets and presentations that have been explicitly published outside of the OregonSD.net domain and are linked to from a public website will be crawled and indexed, which means they can appear in search results you see on Google.com and other search engines. There is no change for documents published inside your organization or shared privately.

If you do not want your published Docs to be crawled, then you must unpublish them by doing the following:

1. Go to the 'Share tab'
2. For documents and spreadsheets, choose 'Publish as web page'. For presentations choose 'Publish/embed'
3. Click on the button that says 'Stop publishing'

For more details, please see this Help Center article: http://www.google.com/support/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=60781

This is a very exciting change as your published docs linked to from public websites will reach a much wider audience of people!

Checkboxes in PowerTeacher assignments are visible to teachers only

When a teacher enters a check mark in their PowerTeacher Gradebook (to indicated that an assignment was collected, or turned in on time, or whatever they want to use the check mark for), parents and students do not see that mark.  It is for teacher use only. 

If a teacher want parents to know that the assignment was collected, or money was collected, or whatever, they will need to use something else (such as an assignment work only one point).  Check marks are for teachers eyes only.

Planned PowerSchool outage Thursday, 9/17, 5:00 PM

PowerSchool will be unavailable for several hours beginning 5:00 PM on Thursday, Sep. 17. This is regular server maintenance including installation of Windows security patches and an incremental upgrade to PowerSchool software. Please plan accordingly.

Internet back to normal- myriad problems solved

Thanks to lots of investigating, research, and phone calls by Zach and Doug, the district's Internet connection is now operating properly. This appears to have fixed the difficulties people were having with United Streaming, Plato, eSped, YouTube, and pretty much anything else that required web access.

As you can see from the pretty picture below, our inbound traffic has still not peaked.

 

What you cannot see is that all the CRC errors on our router have disappeared now that the duplex mismatch between our firewall and the WiscNet router has been corrected.

Thanks again for your patience.

Slow web access

We've received numerous complaints about slow web access, resulting in problems with Discovery Streaming, Plato, and [gasp!] YouTube. We feel your pain- we are experiencing it as well, and we are working on the problem.

We have enough bandwidth to accommodate our traffic, even with the anticipated increase due to Google Apps Gmail. In the graph below, the green parts are incoming traffic, which is 95% web traffic. As you can see, it used only about half of the 20 Mbps available. (The blue line is an upload of backup files, which stopped this morning at 8 AM, and doesn't significantly affect download speeds.)

So, why is this happening? At this point, we believe the issue is caused by a service configuration in our firewall. This summer we replaced an obsolete network firewall with a new one. Like most things technological, the new one has more capabilities, but is also more complex. Everything seemed to be working fine until Tuesday, when everybody returned to school. (It's hard to simulate the 1,600 simultaneous users for a test, so Tuesday was the first day of a real, full load. )

We are working with a Cisco engineer to figure out the problem. We'll keep you updated on this blog.

Gmail outage

On Tuesday, the first day of school, Gmail went down for approximately 100 minutes, starting at 2:30 PM local time. Obviously, this was not a great way to initiate the district's first full day of business after migrating all email systems to Google Apps Gmail. Thanks for your patience.

I knew going into this that Google Apps would have some outages (like any system), so this didn't make me second-guess the decision. It was just the unfortunate coincidence of happening on the first day of school, the first day back after migrating, that made me slap my forehead.

A couple benefits of using Gmail include:

1. Compared to our old email system, Google Apps Gmail is still online a higher percentage of time.
2. When it goes down, it makes national news. This is because it goes down so rarely, and also because so many people use it.
3. Google Apps has a Service Level Agreement of 99.9% uptime for its customers. If it doesn't meet that, it loses money. So there were a whole lot of people working very hard to get it back online.

If you are interested in reading the causes of the outage, you can read the official Gmail blog post. In the future, if you want to check the status of Oregon's IT services, (since we can't email you when email is down), you can check our blog (you are reading it now).

You can also see the global status of Google Apps at http://google.com/appsstatus

gmail service outage

from Google:

"We're aware of a problem with Google Mail affecting a majority of users. The affected users are unable to access Google Mail. We will provide an update by September 1, 2009 3:53:00 PM UTC-5 detailing when we expect to resolve the problem. Please note that this resolution time is an estimate and may change."

http://www.google.com/appsstatus