Comments on Illinois Wesleyan University’s Information Technology: planning and operations
Nov 20th, 2009 by Trey Short
The Telecommunications Office is cutting back on paper! Phone bills will be going out on a quarterly basis starting January 2010. You will receive phone bills in January, April, and July for this fiscal year. If you have any questions please call Linda Biehl at 309-556-3430.
Nov 17th, 2009 by Trey Short
May Term Registration went very well last evening. The first group had 677 people logged in to MyIWU. The second group had 711 people logged in, the third had 550, the final group had 403. System performance was excellent and most completed the registration process in 30 seconds if the class was not closed. Thanks go out to the Web Services, Network Services and Administration Services groups for their work to make the registration events successful this Fall.
Nov 16th, 2009 by Trey Short
Last Wednesday’s registration event for the first year students went very well. The systems involved in the registration process performed as they should. There were no system degradation problems for the registration event that presented the highest system demands to date due to the number of people registering and the amount of class look ups, etc.
May Term registration begins at 6:00pm on Monday, November 16th. ITS will be restarting MyIWU 4:45pm in preparation for the registration event. MyIWU will be unavailable from 4:45 to approximately 5:00pm. An announcement is posted on MyIWU under Campus Announcements. May Term registration has the potential to be the largest registration event. The numbers of potential students registering are listed below.
Group 0 - 623 students - 6:00
Group 1 - 686 students - 6:30
Group 2 - 505 students - 6:45
Group 3 - 254 students - 7:00
Nov 9th, 2009 by Trey Short
After two successful registration events, today’s event for the Sophomore class did not go as well as we planned for. About 5 minutes into the registration event the Luminis Platform (MyIWU) began having performance issues. At 7:55am the servers involved in the registration process were restarted in conjunction with some memory allocation adjustments to restore system functionality. The registration process took some people closer to an hour to complete rather than the typical 15-30 minutes.
At 7:40am 262 students completed registration, an additional 156 completed by 8:30am for a total of 418.
Information Technology Services staff disscussed the registration event at a 9:30 meeting. At the meeting we discussed possible causes for the service degridation and solutions to put in place for the Freshman registration event on Wednesday.
The Office of Information Technology Services and the Registrar’s Office appologizes for the stress many went through at todays registration. We work hard to avoid system problems and will work hard to restore your confidence in the registration process.
Oct 30th, 2009 by Trey Short
Information Technology Services conducted two system tests with the help of the campus community to verify systems are working properly for registration that begins on November 2nd. Tuning and updates have been applied to systems involved with the registration process and the tests indicate all systems are functioning properly. Thanks to all who participated in the tests!
Registration begins at 7:30am on the following dates -
November 2nd - Seniors
November 4th - Juniors
November 9th - Sophmores
November 11th - Freshmen
Sep 24th, 2009 by Trey Short
Curtis applied a hotfix to correct the file access problem in MyIWU Course Tools this morning. All course files are accessable.
Sep 23rd, 2009 by Trey Short
A small upgrade that was applied to the MyIWU system last Friday morning caused an unforeseen error with access to course files that were created with spaces in the file name.
A patch to correct the problem is due from Sungard very soon. The problem should be corrected by Friday morning - 9/25/2009.
The files can be renamed without spaces to correct the problem prior to Friday’s permanent resolution to the problem.
Please call Information Technology Services at 309-556-3900 for assistance or with any questions.
Aug 25th, 2009 by Trey Short
The winning video of the IWU Computer Security Awareness Video Contest held last Spring received Honorable Mention in the national contest sponsored by EDUCAUSE/Internet2 Computer and Network Security Task Force, the National Cyber Security Alliance, ResearchChannel, and CyberWATCH. The contest is held as part of a national campaign to raise awareness of and increase computer security at colleges and universities.
Thirty one universities participated in the video contest. Prizes were awarded for the top three videos, nine videos received honorable mention including the video submitted by IT student assistants Emily Akins, Lucus Loury and Jeremy Henle. All of the videos can be seen at the Research Channel site - http://www.researchchannel.org/securityvideo2009/
Congratulations to Emily, Lucus and Jeremy!!!
Aug 21st, 2009 by Trey Short
Yesterday’s registration event for First Year students experienced some initial system performance problems. The registration event placed the new MyIWU under the heaviest system demands to date. We have determined with the help of Sungard and Akibia, the creators of the MyIWU system, and our support providor, a software configuration problem caused slow system performance. The system did not “crash”, and there were no network problems during yesterday’s registration. The CPU performance reached only 9% on the Banner Server and 7% on the MyIWU server. Memory availability was ample on both systems.
The problem was diagnosed and corrected by 3:45pm. Full system functionality was observed shortly there after. Exact figures show that 147 classes were registered for between 3:30pm and 3:45pm, with 2200 classes being registered for between 3:45pm and 4:05pm.
Isolated problems can occur with any complicated software upgrade. We take these matters very seriously. We will be asking students for their assistance in the coming months to help us test MyIWU prior to the next registration event so the IWU students are confident future registration events go smoothly.
Jul 30th, 2009 by Trey Short
The Web Services and Network Services staff have completed the MyIWU upgrade that has been taking place over the past several days. Curtis, Chris, and Pat have essentially worked non-stop to complete this complicated upgrade. Their outstanding performance is extremely appreciated.
Information Technology Services thanks the campus community for their patience and understanding over the duration of the upgrade. Thank you for your support!!!
With the upgrade we have increased e-mail capacity, the latest Luminis Platform (MyIWU) is installed, we are now running Open LDAP for authentication, and the upgrade lets us start planning for the upgrade to Banner 8.
Log into MyIWU and start exploring the new look and features!!