At http://distsancelearning.scps.nyu.edu, 5:30 am, we observed that Epsilen was down. Instead of getting a sign in page, community members got a message that says “tell us what happened.” We know it’s the end of the term and not being able to access your course is a problem.
10:39 AM, site is back up.
We’ve asked our partners at ConnectEDU to explain why the site was down.
9:16 AM, EDT, site was still inaccessible.
Some members of our learning community had trouble signing onto Epsilen on 5/2/2013 after 10pm ET. The site is working normally now. Epsilen’s recent server change has not produced the performance improvements we need. We are communicating these problems to Epsilen. If you experience a problem, please report it to our help desk so we can document the outage’s impact.
NYU-SCPS Learning Community:
RESOLVED: As of 4/25, systems were running normally.
On 4/24/2013, at approximately 5:15 PM EDT, Epsilen went down and remained down for most of the evening. Instructors and students were not able to access their online classes or complete assignments. We’re sorry. We also could have done a better job communicating with you about what happened when it was happening. We’re working on new and better procedures, but in the meantime, please bookmark this site.
We do not yet know what caused the outage, but will update this announcement as soon as we have new information.
Ted Bongiovanni
Director
NYU-SCPS Distance Learning
This past weekend Epsilen performed work on its servers. As a result, some instructors have noticed that content is missing from their course shells. We’re currently working with Epsilen to find out when this maintenance work will be done and when the content will be restored.
We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience.
UPDATE (2:00 ET): This has been resolved.
Epsilen is experiencing slowness and its server support team is working to correct it.
Some Blackboard Collaborate users are experiencing service disruptions that include disconnections and connection timeouts. Blackboard is working on a solution. Read more here.
On 1/31/13 Apple, for security reasons, remotely disabled Java for many OS X users. Because Blackboard Collaborate, the online classroom platform used in our synchronous (real-time) courses, is Java-based, people with Macs may not be able to access the Collaborate classroom. Follow the steps in this document to access Collaborate.
Yesterday evening (12/3) Epsilen experienced extreme slowness to the point of not being usable. A server in their hosting center failed but the issue has been resolved. Epsilen reports that all systems are now up and running.
Thank you for your patience.
The following message is from Blackboard:
Wimba Classroom has recently experienced a service disruption. Users may have experienced the following symptoms:
Issues with connecting to telephone simulcast feature.
Affected users may receive a fast busy signal.
All other Wimba Classroom systems are functioning as normal.
We apologize for the inconvenience that this disruption may have caused and will continue to work towards reducing further disruptions.
NYU activities and classes will resume on Monday, November 5. Read more here.
NYU is closed through Saturday, Nov. 3. Classes, including online, are cancelled. Read President Sexton’s message here.
NYU and NYU-SCPS online community:
NYU has cancelled classes for Tuesday, October 30, and NYU offices are closed due to Hurricane Sandy. To keep up to date with NYU’s information alerts, visit the NYU website.
NYU and NYU-SCPS online community:
NYU has cancelled classes for Monday, October 29, and NYU offices are closed due to Hurricane Sandy. Because of potential power outages and disruption, online classes are cancelled as well.
To keep up to date with NYU’s information alerts, visit the NYU website.
Some Apple users may be experiencing problems with the Blackboard Collaborate online classroom. Blackboard advises Apple users not to install Java updates until it finishes developing its patch, which the company hopes to make available at the end of next week.
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For those who would like more detail, Blackboard has provided the following:
Apple has recently provided Java updates to Mac 10.7 and 10.8 which negatively impact the usability of Blackboard Collaborate Web
Conferencing. This update also affects earlier versions of Web Conferencing and Elluminate Live!
Please do not install java updates on your Mac. It is also recommended that you set your mac to ignore Software updates.
The most recent updates to Mac 10.7 and 10.8 will cause the following issues:
Mac OS Update for Java 1.6 u37 - The java control panel and java webstart are removed on Mac 10.7 and 10.8 essentially forcing an update to Java 7. Users with Java 1.6u37 will need to install Java 7 to access Blackboard Collaborate web Conferencing.
Mac OS Update for Java 1.7 u9 - Users will be able to access and run Web Conferencing sessions. However, the Application Sharing feature is severely limited as the AppShare host will be unable to click on items within the sharing window.
These issues only affect Mac 10.7 and 10.8 users. Users running earlier versions of the Mac OS 10.5 or 10.6 are not impacted.
Blackboard Collaborate is working on developing a patch and we hope to have it available by the end of next week.
Last night’s classes ran smoothly without any reports of slowness or other performance issues. Epsilen is continuing to make changes and upgrades but operations are running as usual.
Update: This issue has been resolved.
There are reports that the main entry point to Epsilen (epsilen.com) is down. While Epsilen is working to restore operation, they have provided an alternate way to log in to the system: https://www.epsilen.com/Security/login.aspx
Epsilen has reported a series of concurrent and related events that together have overloaded the database, resulting in the performance problems that people have been experiencing this week and earlier.
Epsilen has made software and hardware fixes that will continue over next week, and is also transitioning to a virtual server for reasons of improved performance and management.
We thank everyone for your patience and will continue working with our partners for a resolution of this problem.
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The following message, which provides more detail, is from the CEO of Epsilen:
I’d like to update you on the performance issues we are experiencing and how we’re remediating. The past week has brought an unfortunate perfect storm of events that have contributed to degraded performance. We noticed an acute, and an uncommon extreme load of enrollments into our system - several hundred thousand new users being added. This occurred at the same time we noted both a drive failing on one of our applications, and a database pinch. While individually, these are items that can be triaged appropriately, the three events occurred simultaneously, thereby complicating performance.
Immediate resolutions: We have made some application and database configuration fixes and will continue to do so over the next week. We are already seeing ~ 25-30% improvement in performance in just the initial adjustments we have made. At 3am, we are preparing to allocate additional hardware, and to apply some more substantial fixes to
ancillary applications that are contributing to the overall performance load. We plan on taking down these ancillary applications during this remediation window to apply patches. These systems should be unavailable for only a few minutes. Our core application will not be affected during this time.
Next Steps: We are already in the process of moving all of our IT infrastructure to the cloud since some still remains in hosting centers. In order to provide greater performance, we are accelerating this process. I will be in touch to further inform you on progress being made. Additionally, we are scheduling some back-end work on our enrollment processes that affect performance load. These will be phased in over the next 4 weeks with each incremental change bringing improved performance.
On behalf of our technical and infrastructure team here at Epsilen, I would like to thank you for your patience and continued support despite the challenges you have endured. We look forward to restoring a high performance user experience and will keep you continually informed.
Last night we experienced a system-wide problem with Epsilen that affected our 6:30PM ET classes. Due to site slowness, students and instructors were either not able to log on to Epsilen or experienced significant delays waiting for pages to load.
We are actively working with Epsilen for a resolution. In the meantime, our staff is providing tonight’s students and instructors with an alternate way of entering the Wimba Live Classroom without having to log on to Epsilen first.
We are getting reports that Epsilen is sometimes slow when users are uploading files to drop boxes, posting to blogs or signing into the Live Classroom. We are aware of the problem and our partners at Epsilen are working on fixes. The best strategy is to give pages extra time to load. We will post updates as soon as we have them.
If you are in a synchronous course and using OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, released by Apple on July 25, 2012, you will need to download Java or else you won’t be able to access the Wimba Live Classroom. We made a screencast to show you what to do:
If you need further assistance, please contact the Help Desk.
