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March 24, 2006
Finals Week Winter 2006
Another finals week came and went. Everything was going great until about 2:30pm Friday afternoon. And then Sundown went down. It had been up for 315 straight days. Which is pretty good uptime. Turned out to be a bug we were aware of, and I was planning on patching the server over Spring Break. But of course it didn't quite make it.
The downtime was quite minimal, and the patch was installed Friday afternoon. I then took the server down gracefully this evening at about 20:20. It went down, and came back up with no issue. We should be good to go for another 315 days.
Posted by knabet at 10:22 PM | Comments (0)
March 22, 2006
Sun's Communications Suite
Let's talk about Sun's communications suite. The server applications run... all the time. They never go down they never have issues. What does go down, and what does have issues ( all too often ) is Communications Express. It certainly is a nice program when it works.... WHEN IT WORKS. After having a meeting with the brain trust from Sun today it would appear we are not the only ones dealing with this crap.
What was Sun's response to my rants about their lack of support for palm/blackberry sync, and comms express. "Its Sun's issue that we need to resolve" And my question to that was "Soooooo what's the status?"
This is where the folks became less than open with their answers about a resolution. I sure would like it if Google would buy Sun, and develop GMAIL around Sun's messaging server and then add a calendar portion to it, and integrate that. Sun sucks for client development!!
Posted by knabet at 02:34 PM | Comments (1)
March 13, 2006
Nike is Flash Happy
On my laptop I run Linux, and use firefox for my web browsing. I can go anywhere and see anything I need to... that is until I head off to Nike.com and go to the Jordan Web Site. To go there you need to have Flash 8; which is not available yet for Linux.
I love Nike, they've got good stuff, and they were started local. All reasons for supporting them. Then they go and pay $95million to Lebron James before he dribbles a basketball in the pros. ( although it was a good gamble ) And now they tick of my nerdy side too.
Posted by knabet at 10:20 PM | Comments (0)
Ughh March 15th
March 15th is a date I usually can't wait to come and go. Well it didn't quite come fast enough this year. As most employee's of WOU know, unclassified staff are on a year to year contract. Up until this year most or all of the unclassified staff have been guaranteed that year. Not this year; for me at least. Now I'm only guaranteed 90 days. Real bummer.
I'm guessing the administration has their reasons. With the looming strike, and if the administration has to come up with money they don't have; then there will probably be some cuts. Of course this is all Travis speculation.
Posted by knabet at 09:57 PM | Comments (0)
Calendar Express application
As many of my faithful blog readers.. ( yeah right, like I have many ) have seen I'm currently very down on Communications Express.
There are currently many alternatives to using Comms Express for email, however only 1 for calendar http://sundown.wou.edu:82 That is until now. I've found an application that will allow the use of the calendar. Its quite nicely written, and for now a free option. Hopefully it will stay that way.
This is a two part application. First part is a "Player" and the secondp part is the app itself. If you're interested in it, drop me a note to knabet at wou.edu and I'll make arragements for you to download and use it.
The major downside of this app, however is its a windows based app only. Sorry mac / *nix folks.
Posted by knabet at 09:15 AM | Comments (0)
March 08, 2006
Java Programming
Troy's Blog refers a little about Thin Clients.
As many of you have seen the thin clients are propagating around campus. We are able to do a lot with these little buggers. Including presenting just a web browser, full windows enviornment... I think you get the picture.
Anyway, we wanted a good way of keeping the "kiosk" type functionality of just a web browser, but also make it easy to get into windows. ( without right clicking, and picking windows )
So now that you know what we wanted to accomplish, here's how we did it.
Bill Kernan and I started working on a Java Application. This would be what the user sees on each of the thin clients. The java application has room for some announcements, as well as buttons to open various applications. These as you might guess are web browsers, windows etc..
The cool thing is the web browsers open directly to various needed applications. Including AccountLookup, Banner web for students, or just a default web browser.
Keep your eye on the thin clients. This app is going to revolutionize their use!!
PS:
We used NetBeans as our development platform. I'd done very little Java Programming in my day, and this app made it pretty easy.
Posted by knabet at 10:22 PM | Comments (0)
Webserver back to okay
The re-direct issue is no longer an issue. We figured out a solution by creating a new virtual server class. No, I don't expect anyone to understand what that means, but there's really no other way to put it, because that's what fixed the problem. Just trust me its all working now.
Posted by knabet at 10:18 PM | Comments (0)
webserver re-direct issues
In our testing we have found an issue with re-directs on the new webserver. We're hosting multiple "virtual" servers along with www3.wou.edu
The various re-directs such as www3.wou.edu/faq seems to be re-directing for all virtual servers. Even if the url is http://www.readoregon.org/faq.html it ignores the .html and goes ahead and does the re-direct.
Once we get this figured out we'll post updates.
Posted by knabet at 04:51 PM | Comments (0)
March 06, 2006
Permissions Set
Just a quick update on the webserver update progress.
1. We have created the new webserver.
2. We have copied over all the data.
3. We have copied over all the secure folder information
4. We have copied over all the re-directs.
5. Ron has created a script to set permission on the entire directory structure. Please be sure you send Ron the location of any and all portions of the website you edit.
6. We have been testing the results of the permissions script with ZERO issues so far. We're hoping you ( the users ) will go out and test your specific areas and report back to us.
UCS can guess the way in which users edit the website. We have multiple people editing the same portion of the website, while others may not. Other departments may do "something" different than what we're testing. This is why we're hoping to get a lot of support from the user base.
One quick thing to note. From the information we have gathered up to this point in time. The worst issue that could arise is a user's lack of ability to update web content. We believe the person out there browsing www.wou.edu will see nothing but better, more reliable performance.
So go TEST TEST TEST. And report any issues to webmaster@wou.edu
Posted by knabet at 01:58 PM | Comments (0)