2008-12-30 PowerSchool planned outage 12/31-1/2

PowerSchool will be unavailable beginning at 5:00 AM on December 31 for an upgrade to version 5.2.1. Although it is difficult to predict the duration of the upgrade process, we anticipate the outage will last through January 1, and possibly January 2.

This upgrade provides updated state reporting capabilities, ODBC access to custom fields, improved performance, and a new Oracle database backend.

Thank you for your patience.

2008-12-29 PowerSchool is back online

Early this morning, PowerSchool came back online after four days of processing database schema updates required for the upgrade to version 5.1.3.

(Tips of the hat to Mike Way of CESA 5 support who worked on this over break, including Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and the weekend, and to Chris Brown for his preliminary testing and ongoing support.)

The schema update should not have taken that long (even though Chris told us to expect that it would); PS Support is investigating the cause.

The server is now at version 5.1.3. Our hope was to be fully upgraded to 5.2.1 by the end of break, so we are evaluating options and tentatively planning to perform the upgrade on New Year's Eve and New Year's Day. Another post will confirm any planned downtime for the additional upgrade.

Thanks for your patience.

2008-12-24 PowerSchool unavailable through Dec.26

The PowerSchool upgrade is taking significantly longer than expected. Pearson tech support has escalated it to engineering. The upgrade process will continue today and tomorrow (12/24 - 12/25) and hopefully be completed by late in the day on 12/26.
At this point, it's difficult to give an accurate ETA for completion, but it will be unavailable at least through the 26th.

Check back here for more details.

2008-12-19 PowerSchool planned outage Dec. 22-24

Update: The upgrade is taking longer than originally anticipated. The outage is now scheduled to last through December 24. A new ETA for resumption of service will be posted when we have more information. Sorry for the inconvenience.
----------
PowerSchool will be unavailable on December 22-24 for an upgrade to the latest version. This is necessary in order to receive current state reports. Additionally, it upgrades the database engine to Oracle and makes schema changes to improve speed and allow ODBC queries of custom data fields.

2008-12-18 Viruses in email, and IE security risks

Every holiday brings a new rash of viruses because people are more careless during the holidays. Three have hit us today- attachments to email messages claiming to be a Hallmark e-card for you, or a coupon for McDonald's, or a coupon for Coca-cola.

These are all meant to trick you into opening the attachment, which you should never do. 

2008-12-18 Panther server issues update

Panther did not experience the expected slowdown during third hour today. We have noticed a pattern of Thursdays not having the same slow performance as other days. Additionally, it was noted that today the Desktop Publishing Class did not log in, which may be correlated. We are investigating whether the DTP applications are running locally, as they should, or from the server, which would be bad.

2008-12-16 Panther server continued sluggishness

2008-12-16
Panther server for OHS continues to have sluggish response speed, especially between 9:40 - 11:00 AM.

We have eliminated network congestion as a cause.
All health metrics on Panther report being normal: 3-7% CPU utilization, zero NIC errors, average RAM utilization.
Because no errors are being reported by the server's own health checks, we cannot identify the issue to fix it. We are continuing to investigate and are calling in consultants to help.

We realize this is causing lost productivity and instructional time. This is a top priority for the IT staff. We appreciate your patience in this difficult situation. Please continue reporting any patterns you observe.

Thank you.

How to sync work calendar and email on a smartphone

As people buy "smartphones" like Blackberries (or is it Blackberrys?), Treos, HTCs, and iPhones, the question pops up more frequently: "How can I sync my work mail and my calendar to my phone?"

The quick answer: You don't.

Syncing is a pain. The better alternative is to access all your email and calendar directly from your phone.

To do this, you must first start using the district's Google Apps at www.OregonSD.net. Once you are checking all your email, including your Groupwise email, on your district Gmail account, you can access it anytime with your smartphone. Same with your calendar. Just go to http://calendar.oregonsd.net. You'll be prompted to log in, and then your calendar will be presented in a smartphone-optimized layout for you.

Click on "Email" and you'll get your email, but again in a layout customized to your smartphone.

The beauty of this is simplicity. No extra cords, no extra software, and no syncing.

Update: The problem with this is that Blackberry's web browser is not a full-featured one, and it does not allow you to log in to the OregonSD.net page. Devices running Windows Mobile and Mac OS X (iPhone) are capable of logging in, so this works fine.

Because of this, Blackberry devices still require an external synchronization application, such as GooSync. We're working on documenting the process for getting all this working.

2008-12-12 Problem solved: Slow logins, LDAP errors, and Groupwise crashes

This week has been busy trying to fix slow login issues which appear to have been caused by problems with our LDAP server and a Groupwise server that crashed every day.

These seem to be fixed now.

We installed a patch on Monday on Groupwise, and it has stayed up ever since. The LDAP issue has been fixed, so the authentication service no longer hangs. This should fix the login problems that people have experienced. If you are still having those issues, please contact the helpdesk.

Good news for Brooklyn: the drive imaging service now works at Brooklyn again, so we won't have to bring computers back to the DSO to image them.

Web-based email is back up

Groupwise WebAccess was down at least part of the day on Saturday. As of 8:33 AM Sunday, it is back up.

Licensing restored

The corrupt license has been deleted and reinstalled, logins and Zen applications are working again. We are still having some LDAP errors adn I will keep workign on that issue

Licensing and Login problems - Dec 5

Two related issues this morning in IT land. If you are getting errors similar to "no license available for application XXXXX" - especially for Groupwise or MS Office - then you have options. The error is caused by the Zen Licensing server being corrupt. Fortunately, these applications are on the local PC and can be started without a license by using the old Programs menu instead of the Common Apps menu. 

If you have login errors (results window left open, very slow authentication), keep waiting. This is due to the same server issues and you will eventually get logged in. 

For everyone - most applications from the Zen menus will not work this morning, please right-click the NAL icon and click exit to close this for now.  Anything installed on your computer and accessible through the "Programs" menu should still work. 

I'll update this page and notify building secretaries when things are back to normal.