School of Journalism Transforms iPad into a Satellite Truck

Phil Altiere

School of Journalism’s Phil Altiere presenting at the Content and Communications World Expo in NYC on Nov. 12-13, 2014.

Congratulations to IT Partner Philip Altiere, an instructional support technician in the School of Journalism, for his creativity in helping Stony Brook students use iPads to produce live broadcasts at Wolfstock last fall. Phil wrote the following guest blog for EdTech Digest about the experience that was just published on March 12. He and his students were also invited to present their technique at the Content and Communications World (CCW) Expo at the Jacob Javits Center in New York City last November. Way to innovate!

Support for Google Apps Connector for BlackBerry Enterprise Server Ending Next Year

Image of a BlackBerry phoneGoogle announced that it will be ending support for the Google Apps Connector for BlackBerry Enterprise Server on March 5, 2015. This will affect any Google Apps user with a BlackBerry OS 7 or older device connecting to Google Apps with a BlackBerry Enterprise Server version 5.0.3.

Read the full announcement on the Google Apps blog.

Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) Replacement Taking Place March 15

DoIT Data Center Old UPS

There will be an electrical power outage in the West Campus Computing Center on Saturday, March 15 (spring break), beginning at 6 a.m. and lasting until 6 p.m. This will cause several systems and applications to be unavailable for a large portion of the day and is necessary as DoIT works to replace an aging Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) located in the West Campus Data Center. The Computing Center is the only building that will be affected by this power outage, however, all dependent servers, systems, applications, and services that reside in the Data Center will be brought down while the UPS is replaced.

Please be advised that the following academic technologies WILL BE UNAVAILABLE on March 15, during the 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. maintenance window:

  • Blackboard

  • Adobe Connect (SB Connect)

  • Echo360 (SBCapture)

  • SINC Site computers (all SINC Sites including computers in the Library Reading Rooms)

  • Printing (including Print From Anywhere)

  • Virtual SINC Site

DoIT fully expects that the following services WILL BE AVAILABLE:

  • PeopleSoft/SOLAR

  • File Servers

  • Active Directory

  • Google Apps for Education

  • High Profile Public Web Servers (e.g. www.stonybrook.edu)

Throughout the day on March 15, system status updates will be posted on the DoIT website (http://it.stonybrook.edu) and the SBU DoIT Twitter feed (https://twitter.com/sbudoit) to keep you informed when systems are brought back online.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause. Please plan accordingly and check with your local IT support technician if you have any questions or concerns. IT support technicians with further questions may contact Ronald Florek, Computing Center Building Manager at (631) 632-8038.

Thank you for your attention to this important hardware upgrade announcement.

Cross-Departmental Cooperation Key to DoIT’s System Status Reporting

Screenshot of DoIT System Status CheckMembers of the DoIT staff met on Monday, March 3, to discuss improvements to the System Status monitoring and reporting process. Historically, there have been technical issues with the DoIT website due to caching that delayed the publication of system status entries which ultimately was leading to the same status events being reported multiple times.

Richard von Rauchhaupt, DoIT’s web architect, recently implemented some back-end changes to the site which should now allow for immediate publication of these system status entries by purging the cache of the home page and service pages whenever a system status entry is created. In addition, he added a new block to the system status creation screen which shows any currently-affected systems. It is our hope that this will reduce the duplication of status events since we have representatives from Systems and Operations, Client Support, Data Network Services, and TLT adding service disruptions and outages.

The group agreed it is better to have multiple entries for an outage, rather than not reporting it at all. In short, when it doubt, someone from the DoIT staff will be posting alerts into our Drupal content management system.

It was also recommended that our system status managers publish a reasonably detailed description of the outage or service disruption and an acknowledgement when a certain team has taken ownership of a problem and is in the middle of working on a solution. Our team has recommitted itself to periodically updating system status messages with new details (when applicable) and will attempt to provide time estimates for system resolution as they become available.

For major systems used by the majority of our campus community (PeopleSoft/SOLAR, Blackboard, Google Apps, WolfieNet, etc.), it was also agreed upon that our system status managers post the system status to the SBU DoIT Twitter feed (@SBUDoIT or #SBUDoIT). This is automatically done if the “Post to Twitter” checkbox is checked in Drupal. Our system status managers only need to post it to Twitter once per outage since the URL displayed on Twitter will reflect any updated messages throughout an event.

During the next few months, DoIT’s web team will be looking at building out some basic metrics related to system downtime reported through system status entries. This will give us a baseline on how available our systems tend to be based on reports which can be compared to other benchmarks to see if we are catching all system status events, and to see which systems are unstable. These metrics will rely on accurate reporting and resolution of system status events.

Our team agreed that if a status event is resolved, but there are potential side effects or new user instructions, the disruption or outage will be closed and a new “informational” entry will be created. This will allow for long-term notifications to our users while still allowing us to accurately track the outage and downtime.

Finally, when a system is down during a scheduled outage, we will now display a red “X” instead of the calendar icon (if an event was originally entered as “scheduled maintenance”) on the home page and system status screen. This will more accurately reflect when a service is down. In the system status archive, we will still show the calendar so that users know that most of our outages are planned and due to required system maintenance.

We welcome any feedback on these changes and certainly hope this makes things clearer for our IT Partners and the University community as a whole.