Vista Review of Recent Downtime

I wanted to give you a quick review of the past couple of weeks, since it may affect a few responses to students:

• December 1 and 2 - students were unable to submit attachments through Vista.
• December 3rd - BB re-booted the database and server (we have 9). This corrected the attachment problem, but meant BB was down from 11:30 am until almost 1:00 pm.
• December 7th: More attachment submission problems.
• December 8th: BB re-booted the system unexpectedly, down for approximately 25 minutes Saturday am.

That means there was at least one weekend when your students were genuinely unable to submit attachments and a couple of times when they may have been booted out of an in-process exam.

So what are we doing about this? We are upgrading to a snazzy new database server with more and faster processors. BB hosting has scheduled the transition to the new hardware for December 28 through 30. It should take 48 hours; when I have specific times I will let you know. You can assume that BB Vista will be down for most of the 28th through the 30th though. When we come up again we hope to be more stable.

Thanks for a good semester everyone! Technical issues aside we have once again had very few student complaints this semester. We truly do appreciate all of the time and effort you put into your classes!
Lisa