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DoIT to Restart Bb System on Wed., 1/16/14 @ 10 a.m.

Known Issue with Bb Export/Import and Assessments

1/16/14 UPDATE

DoIT will be taking down Bb again at 10 a.m. today to address the issues below. We anticipate this will take one hour.

1/15/14 UPDATE

This morning's restart did not resolve these known issues with slow export/import of course shells, or creation of tests and assessments. Our case has been escalated with Bb support and we continue to troubleshoot the issue. I will update this notice when I feel the issue is resolved.

I realize this is very inconvenient for faculty preparing Spring 2014 courses. Thank you in advance for your patience.

John Fritz
Asst. VP, Instructional Technology & New Media
UMBC Division of Information Technology

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To address two known issues following last week's upgrade to the main Blackboard production system, DoIT will be restarting Blackboard tomorrow, January 15, at 9 a.m. We anticipate the system will be down for one hour. 

Since last week's upgrade, several faculty have reported the following issues: 
  1. Exporting and importing old courses is taking unusually long or even "timing out"
  2. Creating tests or assessments is returning an "object not found" or "reference ID" error message.
In some cases, we have found that both issues can be mitigated by just waiting a little longer to click a "submit" button and let these processes complete. However, we know this is unacceptable, particularly as more faculty return to prepare their course sites for the Spring 2014 semester. 

We have been working with Blackboard, which believes the errors are related to multiple "building blocks" or "plugins" being out of synch with the main production system since last week's upgrade. Blackboard recommends a rolling restart of the main production system, which we are doing tomorrow instead of a regular, weekly scheduled maintenance on Friday nights. This reboot does not affect Winter 2014 Bb courses or online placement exams, all of which are operating on a separate server at bb-winter.umbc.edu.

After the Bb system restart, if you experience any problems, please submit a Request Tracker (RT) ticket via the myUMBC help menu or directly at my.umbc.edu/help.



Posted: January 14, 2014, 4:57 PM

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