CTS Announcements & Systems Status

There have been unexpected problems encountered during the moodle maintenance. Announcements will be made periodically or when service is restored.

The Moodle outage announced earlier today will commence in approximately five (5) minutes. Please wrap up any activity and log out at soon as possible.
Another announcement will be sent when the maintenance is over, which should be within a half hour.

To the Campus Community:
The Moodle maintenance window scheduled for Friday, August 19^th has been canceled and tentatively rescheduled for Friday, August 26^th at 8:00 P. M. to Saturday, August 27^th at 8:00 A. M. Moodle will be unavailable during this time. Please plan your Fall 2016 course preparation accordingly.
We have delayed in order to ensure that our Moodle migration is as transparent and minimally disruptive to you as possible. We have encountered a small subset of very large Moodle courses that have been problematic to the migration process during testing. Our team is working to resolve this issue so that we can complete the final migration to our new hosting provider in a timely manner. We also continue to configure and test the course shell request and creation process to ensure that it works seamlessly in the new Moodle environment.

There will be a brief Moodle outage today (Thursday 8/18) at 4:30 pm. CTS will be upgrading the resources assigned to the server to improve its performance.
The outage is expected to be brief; no more than half an hour. Announcements will be posted at the start and end of the maintenance.

ITEC will be upgrading hardware which will make all hosted services unavailable between 4-6am on Wednesday August 20th. The hosted services include Banner/BearPAWS/BearDeN.

The cloud hosting company for the College web site has announced a maintenance window from 11:00 pm Wednesday (Aug 17) to 7:00 am Thursday (Aug 18).
The hosting company states that according to plan, “Sites may see a momentary interruption in site traffic” at some point during this window.
This will affect only the main College web site. It will not affect moodle, email, or other services.

To The Campus Community:
CTS has worked diligently this summer to upgrade and improve a number of the mission-critical technologies utilized by faculty, staff, and students. I am pleased to inform you that we will be moving Moodle to an off-campus hosting provider, as well upgrading to the latest version of the platform. An extended maintenance window will be required to complete the project. During this window, Moodle will be unavailable while final course data is migrated from our on-campus servers to the new hosting provider.
Please be advised that we are tentatively planning for Moodle to be unavailable beginning Friday, August 19^th at 8:00 P. M. until approximately Saturday, August 20^th at 8:00 A. M. to complete the migration. Please plan accordingly. Any changes to our current plan will be announced by Thursday evening, and a confirmation email will be sent to the campus on Friday.
What does this migration mean for you?

• You can continue to prepare your Fall 2016 courses right up until 8:00 P. M. on Friday, August 19^th. At that time, a copy of all your data will be moved to the upgraded Moodle site at our hosting provider.
• Beginning Saturday, August 20^th, you can continue to prepare courses at the new Moodle site. All your data from our current Moodle site will be available to you in the new one.
• Past semester course data will also be migrated to the new system.
• Course shell request processes will remain the same for our new site.
• Procedures for seeking help remain the same. Please contact moodlesupport@potsdam.edufor assistance with Moodle specific issues. Please contact helpdesk@potsdam.edu for assistance with username and passwords.

Why are we migrating Moodle now?

• We have very few, small windows where such a migration can take place without affecting live courses. While there is never a perfect time for such an outage, this window, between summer session final grade submission and the beginning of the fall semester, is the most suitable for a migration of this size.
• The new Moodle site will be more stable and reliable, utilizing the Amazon Web Services cloud for hosting. We wanted to have this stability in place before this coming academic year.

The maintenance last Saturday was completed successfully.

We’d like to invite you to apply for a job at our Helpdesk in Stillman Hall if you have been awarded Federal Work Study at Potsdam.
You don’t need to be a computer wiz to work for us. All we ask is a willingness to learn and an interest in technology. If you have a computer and have installed software, a printer or other device, that’s a great start. We’ll teach you much more as you help us support the College technology and you’ll gain valuable skills to take with you after graduation.
We have a PDF that you can download and fill out electronically or bring into the Helpdesk.
https://www.potsdam.edu/cts/news/studentemployment.cfm
We look forward to you joining our team!

The scheduled maintenance has begun.