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June 22, 2009
UMBC In the Loop: Dr. Manil Suri on the ResearchChannel
In the latest episode of "UMBC In the Loop" UMBC President Freeman Hrabowski interviews Dr. Manil Suri, professor of mathematics and best-selling novelist on his teaching, research and two novels, "The Death of Vishnu" and "The Age of Shiva."
Airdates - Eastern:
July 8 @ 4:00am, 10:00am, 4:00pm, 10:00pm
The seres is produced by UMBC's New Media Studio.
The ResearchChannel is a consortium of higher education institutions broadcasting nationally to 38 million satellite and cable television subscribers. It can be viewed on UMBC cable channel 16.
You may also view the program online on UMBCtube.
Posted by shewbrid at 4:18 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Explore Possibilities With Wimba Classroom, (6/25, 7/28, 8/13)
Wimba Classroom is a real-time virtual classroom environment designed for distance education, hybrid classes and collaboration.
This live, virtual classroom supports audio, video, application sharing, content display and whiteboarding. In addition, faculty can hold office hours, host guest lectures, webcasts, set up workspace for student groups and create meetings. The program enables application sharing from your desktop or a remote desktop and can be archived. You can set up group study areas for any class, not just the online variety.
Check out demos, documentation and webinars from the Wimba site at http://wimba.com/services.
Join us for one of the demos (sign up at http://www.umbc.edu/training) or contact Joan Costello at ext. 5-3685 or jcostello@umbc.edu to meet one on one or as a group.
Posted by darnold at 8:53 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 16, 2009
Information for New Students
Should you buy a new computer? Where can you get a myUMBC account? What services are available in the Residence Halls? Answers to new students' common questions regarding computing resources available at UMBC compiled into one page. Please visit https://spaces.umbc.edu/display/oit2/Information+for+New+Students.
If your questions are not still answered, we are here to help you. Please contact the Help Desk at 410-455-3838 or submit your question by visiting http://my.umbc.edu/request/help
Posted by anna at 11:15 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 9, 2009
ECS Computer Room Power Outage Updates
This morning beginning at 3:00AM, UMBC’s main computer room suffered a series of three brief, but serious, power fluctuations. Under normal circumstances the uninterruptable power supply (UPS) that protects the computer room would prevent power fluctuations from causing problems. Unfortunately, the UPS itself suffered a hardware failure that left the main computer room in the ECS building unprotected. This resulted in all servers being abruptly shut down and rebooted. At 6:00AM we called in staff and began remediation.
As a result of the UPS failing, one of the decisions we had to make this morning was whether or not to remain on BGE power or to transfer operations over to using power from the generator. Ultimately, the decision was made to transfer to generator power due to the forecast of severe thunderstorms in the late afternoon. If we had remained on BGE power and a brief power fluctuation were to occur, the UPS would not have protected us. The decision to transfer to generator power meant that we had to spend 2.5 hours safely shutting down the servers that had survived the original power fluctuations before we could transfer to generator. We successfully moved to generator at 11:15AM.
While a loss of power is serious we have traditionally fared quite well suffering little equipment damage. Unfortunately, this power outage caused a considerable amount of damage to our equipment, which complicated the restoration of services. Some of the damage that occurred is listed below:
• Three of our four Fibre Channel Switches that support file storage for AFS, Mail and Web services were destroyed. As part of our disaster recovery (DR) plan we maintain some excess capacity. DoIT staff were able to utilize other equipment by running new fiber cabling and get this restored later in the afternoon.
• One of our two IBM DS4800 storage systems, each holding twenty terabytes of storage, were damaged and will need to be replaced. These storage systems provide data storage for Blackboard, Windows file shares, and Mail. As part of our DR plan DoIT staff reconfigured the disk storage and we use for mirroring data and brought this back up.
• The Host Management Console that is required by the PS Finance server was corrupted by the outage. Our staff spent several hours restoring this so that we could restore operations for the Finance database server.
• Power Supply Failure on the server that runs the Legato backup software. This server manages all of the nightly tape backups that occur on all systems. We are currently awaiting a replacement part from the vendor.
• The repeated up-and-down power outages caused synchronization issues with our virtual machine infrastructure and this required we work with our vendor, VMWARE, to reestablish Windows file services and Blackboard.
• The decision early Tuesday morning to move operations over to using power from the generator turned out to be prescient as we learned late in the morning that the UPS system would need to have a part flown in overnight. The vendor will be working on this on Wednesday and we will schedule a time outside normal business hours to move off generator power.
As part of the outage we have been utilizing our disaster recovery plans and validate what has worked well and where we need to focus on in the future.
Actions that worked well:
• Using the text messaging to get word out to the campus when email was down;
• Putting up a quick web page to keep the campus informed;
• Having run “virtual” simulations of disasters scenario’s; and
• Designing redundancy into the systems we deploy.
Issues we have identified that we need to address in future.
• Lessening the inter-dependence of services. We have a number of services that would seem to be independent of one another but as a result of inter-dependencies are not. This makes it more difficult to get services restored;
• Better standardization of our file storage. We have a large amount of file storage purchased over the last four years from different vendors for cost reasons. This adds to the complexity of restoring service during an outage; and
• A simple technical change, setting our servers so if they lose power they shutdown and don’t reboot. This change could have lessened the synchronization issues we encountered.
Posted by mikec at 9:14 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 8, 2009
Experienced Hybrid Teachers Share Lessons Learned
Three faculty experienced in hybrid teaching shared what works or doesn't during a lunch time panel for the June 4 Hybrid Course Re-Design Workshop at UMBC. Comments by Tim Hardy (Economics), Tyson King-Meadows (Political Science) and Katie Morris (Social Work) are now available on YouTube, iTunesU and UMBC's own Streaming Media site.
Posted by fritz at 7:33 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack