Parents can now sign up for text notifications

Parents and guardians are now able to sign up to receive text message (SMS) alerts from the Oregon School District.

To sign up for text messages, and to choose which type(s) of notifications to receive via text, follow these steps:

1. Log in to the Campus Portal at http://www.OregonSD.org/portal. If you do not have a Campus Portal account, you can request one by sending an email to portal@oregonsd.net
2. On the left side of the Portal window, click on the Contact Preferences link.
3. In the contact preferences grid each row is for a phone number or email address. Each column is for a type of notification that you can receive, such as: Emergency, Attendance, General Notification or Priority Notification.
4. Select the "Text (SMS)" checkbox in the grid to indicate which phone number(s) should receive text messages, and for which types of notifications. I suggest selecting "Emergency" and "Priority Notification," since these are time-sensitive notices.
5. Click Save.

Please note that although there is no charge from the district for text messages, your cell phone provider may charge you for text (SMS) service. I hope you find this new service beneficial.

Update: Firefox, Adobe Reader, and Java

We are continuing to work on fixing Adobe Reader and Java plugins in Firefox. Thanks to alert reader Mark L., I am posting some additional information specifically about Campus gradebooks and Java.
The new version of Firefox is disabling certain versions of Java by default because Java has some widely-reported security issues. (See my previous post for more info.) This means that when you open your Campus gradebook in Firefox, you get a screen that warns you "This plugin has security vulnerabilities."

You can override this by clicking on the link that says "Click here to activate the Java(TM) Platform SE 7 U plugin."

When you click on the link, you'll be greeted by a screen asking if you are sure you want to run this application. Click Run. Your gradebook will open shortly.

After we get the Adobe Reader issue fixed, we'll work on updating the Java plugin so that you'll no longer have to go through this process. In the meantime, please feel free to continue using your gradebook with this workaround.

New Firefox has plugins disabled

Yesterday we deployed a new version of Firefox in order to fix the problem with Advanced Search not working in Infinite Campus. Unfortunately, many of the plugins to Firefox are disabled in the new version because they are old. We are working to restore the plugin functionality to Firefox while making sure we are maintaining secure versions. (Some of the plugins, especially Adobe Acrobat and Java, have had many security issues in recent versions.)

One workaround for reading Adobe Acrobat files (PDFs), is to right-click on the file, save it on your computer, and then open the file in Acrobat Reader. This opens the file in the actual Acrobat Reader application instead of using the web browser plugin.

Infinite Campus scheduled maintenance 2/20 5-10 PM

This is to inform you of scheduled maintenance that is going to be conducted on your site by Infinite Campus.  On February 20 this maintenance will be conducted on all districts in the states of WI, MI and IN.  Districts may experience a fifteen to twenty minute service disruptions between the hours of 5pm and 10:00 pm local time.  We are updating our anti-virus software and this takes a reboot of the server.  If your district has a conflict with this maintenance window please submit a support case with the subject: Conflict With Maintenance Window.  The work will then be rescheduled.

Email virus outbreaks detected and blocked

There have been a couple of email virus outbreaks detected and blocked. These were NOT in the Oregon domain, but were sent to OSD email addresses from an external sources. Our email security/anti-virus sends a message back to the sender in these cases claiming the destination is unavailable.

Action: block '550 mailbox unavailable'
Source: 217.76.69.114
Time: 2013/02/18 16:27:29 GMT

Action: block '550 mailbox unavailable'

Source: 79.106.15.113
Time: 2013/02/18 16:29:39 GMT

"Ghost messages" from the past seem to have stopped, but please turn off POP anyway

The "ghost messages" from January 23-25 that inexplicably arrived in people's mailboxes yesterday seem to have stopped. We are still investigating the cause of the problem.

Although we don't think it's related, you should turn off POP mail in your Gmail account. It's no longer necessary to have enabled, and having it turned off will eliminate a variable while we are trying to troubleshoot issues with mail delivery.

Here are the directions (also available on the IT support site).

Procedure

1. Log in to your OSD Gmail account
2. Under the "gear" icon, select Settings as shown below.
   
   
   
3. Click on Forwarding and POP/IMAP
4. In the POP Download section, choose the Disable POP button.
5. Click Save Changes at the bottom of the page. See below.
   
   

Your Gmail account will no longer try to check email from another account.

Gmail messages being re-delivered from January 23-25

Good news: Our weekend project of building a time machine seems to have worked!

Bad news: A bunch of our email got sucked into the time vortex, so email messages that we received between January 23-25 are being received again. I guess we shouldn't have hooked the flux capacitor up to a computer that has our email account on it.

Actually, we have no idea why some (many?) staff are receiving messages again that were originally sent between January 23-25. We are investigating it, but so far cannot tell what is causing it. We will continue investigating and post updates when we discover something useful. Sorry for all the confusion.

Update: workaround for problems caused by anti-virus software

Josh and Doug have spent many hours researching the cause of the slow logins and it appears to be a combination of issues related to our anti-virus software. Our server was overloaded and Kaspersky released an update which caused problems. The server couldn't keep up with the update requests, so the fix to the bad update couldn't be pushed out. So, machines were stuck with a bad version of anti-virus, and the server couldn't deliver the fix. (Arrrgh.)

We have disabled Kaspersky on startup for the endpoints, but left the service running on the server. So far we haven't heard any complaints after restarting the machines. Hopefully this will solve the problem in the short term. Our long-term solution is to provide a more powerful server for the anti-virus.

Sorry again for the loss of instructional time.

Jon

PS- Here's the official notice from Kaspersky
"If you are experiencing the following symptoms: explorer.exe and /or MS Office applications crashing, or login prompt not appearing, please be aware that Kaspersky Lab is working on a resolution. Also, please go to http://usa.kaspersky.com/support/companyaccount and open an online case. Once a resolution is available a member of the business support team will contact and assist you. Kaspersky Lab apologizes for any inconvenience this may have caused."

Slow/freezing logins

We are still having problems with computers freezing or taking a long time logging in. We thought we had a workaround yesterday but it still appears to be happening. Feel free to submit helpdesk tickets if you like, but we are aware of the issue and will keep you updated when we have more to share.

Moodle server back up

Update:

The Moodle server is working again. Sorry for the interruption.

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The Moodle server is not responding. We are trying to restore service.