The Curative Analysis team in IT is tasked with finding the causes of significant IT issues that affect campus. In this news update, we draw your attention to some of the problems being investigated or issues handled recently.
myWCU Login Page Unavailable: The C: drive on one of the web servers for myWCU filled up recently, causing errors for some faculty, staff, and students when they tried to log into myWCU. IT staff immediately increased the drive capacity to alleviate this issue. To prevent this problem from occurring in the future, IT purchased a new monitoring tool which will send an alert if the drive space is nearing full capacity. The new monitoring tool, Nagios, is now in place on all myWCU servers and includes drive space monitoring and alerts so that similar situations will be prevented in the future.
myWCU Connection to Personal Services: On several occasions, faculty, staff, and students reported an error when attempting to log into Personal Services through myWCU. An increase in registration activity revealed that we were exceeding the number of connections allowed to the system by default. The IT Applications team worked with the UNC-General Administration who hosts the system for us and the vendor, Ellucian, to increase the number of simultaneous connections allowed to the system. In addition to the increase in connections, IT staff upgraded the system from Oracle 11 to Oracles 12C and applied updates to Banner. We are continuing to monitor the connections and provide activity information to Ellucian to provide the optimum number of connections.
Network Connections in Residence Halls: Students reported issues connecting to wireless access points in some residence halls at the beginning of the Spring semester. Closer diagnosis revealed three separate issues. A particular model of transceivers located in some residential buildings on campus is known to fail at random. The manufacturer is replacing the faculty transceivers under a lifetime warranty. Networking analysts also identified an error in a script and quickly stopped the faulty script from processing. Both of these issues revealed a third, underlying configuration issue which was preventing some streaming and gaming devices to connect to the WCU network. The configuration issue was quickly corrected, resolving all network issues in the residence halls.
January 2017
Global Problems: (Total 17)
Network: 11
Business Systems (Banner, myWCU, Personal Services, help.wcu.edu): 4
Skype for Business: 1
Blackboard: 1
The Division of IT is committed to adopting a proactive, process-oriented approach to prevent problems before they arise. We will continue to keep you informed on our progress.