CTS Announcements & Systems Status

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.

This Saturday (August 13) at 5:00 am, CTS will migrate one of its network monitoring systems onto Data Center hardware. During this time wireless networking on campus might be unavailable, and the wired network in Kellas may be down. The outage is expected to last no more than an hour.
Messages will be posted when the work begins and when it is finished.

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.

Last night’s batch of users, including all of Raymond Hall, was the largest single group we have migrated so far.  Users’ mail is still being copied as of this writing.  Please be patient and give the process some more time to complete.
Be advised that the process is NON-DESTRUCTIVE, and that all of your pre-migration e-mail still exists on our old server where you can still reference it via Apple Mail, Thunderbird, BearMail, or SOGo.  If you need to reference e-mail that has not yet made its way into Office 365, you can find it there in the meantime.

Apogee’s Engineering Team has made a decision to change our SSID’s/Network names within the next week and now all schools will have 2 network SSID’s instead of 1.  The main reason for the change was incompatibility between the 2.4Ghz wireless devices and 5 Ghz wireless devices.

• MyResNet Legacy-2.4 Ghz devices; if a device is 2.4 ghz only this will be the only network they will see.
• MyResNet-For 5ghz devices