PowerSchool planned outage Tuesday, Dec. 15, 5-6 PM

PowerSchool will be unavailable Tuesday, December 15, 5-6 PM while new drivers are installed. This will hopefully resolve the issues we've been having with random reboots following an error with a driver.

OMS Server [update]

The OMS server stopped responding at approximately 12:10PM on Monday Dec 7. The server rebooted itself and came up back up with errors. Further investigation showed that some configuration files had been corrupted. This issue was corrected and the server was rebooted once more. This eliminated the errors and the server server returned to normal at about 2:25PM.

OMS Server

The OMS server ("Middle") is not communicating on the network right now. I will post an update when more is known. Thank you,

PowerSchool unexpected restart debrief

The Powerschool server unexpectedly restarted today at 11:59am.  Analysis of the event log points to the driver for the HP Integrated Lights Out driver.  (HPQILO2)

We are researching it and trying to prevent future occurrences.

How to get to blocked short-links

Q: I've been frustrated trying to use twitter here at school.  I'm getting some great resources from the people I follow, but when I click on the links, they are blocked with a "security.proxy" warning.  Is there a way to work around this?  Is this due to the abbreviated links? 

A: Yes, this is due to the shortened links. I often have the same frustration. Twitter has made services like bit.ly, tr.im, and tinyurl.com very popular. The URL shortening services are seen as proxy sites, and are a growing security risk. This is because you can't see what site you are really going to before you go there, so you can't make a smart decision about whether it's a safe site or not.

The solution:

http://longurl.org/

In the strange world of the Internet, the site above is meeting this need by expanding shortened URLs so you don't blindly follow a link that will install malware or something. So, although annoying, the solution is to resolve those shortened URLs using longurl.org and then deciding whether it's safe to go to them.

Certificate error message last weekend

Several people reported a Security Certificate Error when trying to log in to Google Apps last weekend. This was caused by a problem with our authentication server's security certificate. There was not a real security threat, but I really appreciate people stopping and contacting IT before proceeding, so that we could determine whether somebody was trying to intercept information.

We have a workaround in place (since Sunday- thanks Zach!) and are working on a permanent solution.

Allowing YouTube videos through the Educational Video Library (EVL)

Have you ever wanted to approve certain YouTube videos so that students could watch them in class individually, instead of showing them to everyone on the big screen? Well, now you can. Introducing the Educational Video Library, which lets staff pre-approve videos from YouTube which will be viewable by students through our content filter. See http://sites.google.com/a/oregonsd.net/technology-integration-tool/Home/youtube-videos for instructions.