Recently in Work Misc Category

On Saturday all three air conditioning units in the server room shut down, and the place rapidly turned into an oven. Our servers put out a lot of heat, and have to be kept cool to prevent Bad Things from happening... and so when the air handlers stopped, Bad Things started to happen.

Luckily, only a couple of servers had actual hardware damage, and those didn't have anything critical on them. Several more servers shut down ungracefully or started behaving erratically. Luckily our two biggest servers, cougar and sundown, never actually crashed, but since our main network infrastructure server did, nobody could get to cougar or sundown.

Since I live so close to campus, I got called in, but it was Paul Lambert and Dave Diemer who did most of the heavy lifting. Once the major problems were cleared away, then I could do my thing. Dave was still working on three servers until the next morning, and I was up until really late babysitting the webserver, which seemed to go catatonic every few minutes for no apparent reason. We'll still be cleaning this up for a while.

OK, I'm trying to get back into this blogging thing. This month my main project has been setting up a system to automatically populate Moodle courses with the students who have registered for them. Currently, if the course has an online component in Moodle, each student has to get an enrollment code from their professor and then sign on to Moodle and enter that code to enroll in the Moodle course.

To save this extra step, I've developed a system that can look at a CRN entered in Moodle, and go to Banner and get the roster of students registered in that course, then create an enrollment record for them in that Moodle course. This was a little hairy to figure out because the Moodle database doesn't just say "this student is enrolled in this course"; there's an abstraction layer I don't fully understand, but I did figure out how to use it to enroll a student.

I'm just waiting for the CRNs to be entered into Moodle, and then I can run the script. I'll set ut up to run every morning for the first few weeks of the term, to catch late adds. I don't yet have a good way to unenroll a student from a course, so the professors are going to have to handle drops on their own.

The ultimate goal is to automatically create a Moodle course component for every course listed in Banner for a given term, but that's still a ways off. I'll need to dissect the process by which Moodle course shells are created, and find a way to do that via a script.

The next major project is to clean up our user database before we move to the new LDAP, email and calendar servers sometime in the next few months. We have several thousand accounts ont he system for students who did not graduate but have not registered for any classes for two years; over the long term, we're going to delete accounts when they reach that point, but the first time we do it, we'll be getting rid of about five years' worth at once.

This will mean cleaning out a lot of disk space, too, at least hopefully. Students already lose access to their files after they leave or graduate, but a lot of that stuff is still on the system. Graduates will still keep their email addresses, as long as they log in every couple years or so, but they won't have an on-campus network login, or any file storage.

I feel like we've been running around putting out fires for so long, it'll be really nice to actually make some progress on something like this.

Oh, and I'm on Facebook now if anybody's into that. Just look for me by name; there are more Swartzendrubers than you might expect, but only one Ron who is listed as Western Oregon staff.

I've been fighting a low-level cold for a couple of weeks, and I thought I had it beaten, but last Thursday it came back and bought its friends. That pretty much shot my weekend, but I'm feeling better now and ready to get caught up on the stuff I got behind on from taking sick time.

Other than that, the main thing I'm working on now is a way to automatically create everybody a Moodle account, so we can link Moodle to the WOUPortal. In case you aren't familiar with Moodle, it's our main tool for online classes, or for adding online content to normal classes. Some of our online class stuff is still on the old WebCT server, but most of it has been moved to Moodle. To check out Moodle, go to http://online.wou.edu.

The next project is to automatically enroll students in the Moodle courses as soon as they register for the class in Wolf Web. I've figured out the basics of how to do this, but the tricky part will be to detect when people drop courses, and un-enroll them in Moodle.

I've been busy again (who isn't, these days?) And likely to be more so until we can hire someone to replace Shaun Gatherum, who will be missed around here.

The web conversion is moving along, mostly in the hands of individual people in various departments. I'm working on a way to make the new template function on our database server; right now, a lot of our database applications like the faculty/staff directory and the account lookup system still use the old template. I can make the new template work for non-secure connections to the database, but not secure ones as yet. This may not be fixable until the database server upgrade, but we'll see.

My other big project at the moment is trying to automate Windows domain user creation. You may or may not know that your WOU network usernamer and password actually apply to two different accounts; there's the Windows Domain account, which you use to log into your computer and access network drives, and there's also your LDAP account, which provides access to your email, and your blog, and secure folders on the website, and the forums, and most anything else on any of our servers.

The LDAP account is created automatically, but until recently we have had to create the matching domain account by hand, which is a pain. However, I recently found a way to automate at least part of the process, and am looking to automate the whole thing soon. This probably won't make much difference to anyone outside UCS, except that it might free up more of our time to help you.

We're changing some of our web shortcuts (such as http://www.wou.edu/blogadmin and http://www.wou.edu/newmail) to use the https protocol.

This is the same protocol that is used for financial transactions on websites such as PayPal and Amazon; it means that all information you send is encrypted so that it cannot be intercepted en route.

However, this seems to have exposed a bug in our blog server; when you go to post an entry, the system returns you to the login page. If this happens, you can change the "http:" in the page address to "https:" and you should be good to go. (You may have to do this twice when posting a blog entry.)

I'm working on a fix for this, though it might wait until I get the blog server software updated.

Well, this is extremely short notice, but I'm off to Crater Lake for the rest of the week. There's a place down there that we thought was going to come available next month, but it turns out the only time we can get is... this week!

So I'm working frantically to try to get stuff done that I'd promised would be "this week". We'll see how it goes.

I got back from my vacation in the middle of last week and found myself busy again, needless to say.

Current projects, in no particular order:

• Finalizing daily automatic user creation: This is really close to done. The user creation script itself works just fine; all I need to do is go through the code and make sure I can turn off all output to the screen, because when you run something as a scheduled task (AKA crontab or "cron" job in the unix world) any output that would normally go to the screen instead gets emailed to the user under whose security privileges the job runs as. I can't just redirect all output to null, because if there's ever an error message, we need that email to notify us, so instead I need to make sure that all non-critical output is suppressed inside the script.


• Website master database: This is a big one, and I'll be talking about it more in the next weeks. We've been planning for almost a year to redo our entire website, primarily to make it easier to maintain. It will be written in PHP and we'll hide a lot of the common template features in external files. Anyone who views the source code of a WOU web page can see how complex our current template source is; this will be replaced by a few lines at the top and bottom of the file, with only the actual page content in between (still written in HTML so people don't have to learn a whole new language.) These external files will query our Oracle database for some page-specific information, and right now I'm working on the administration utilities for that information.


• Detail work on the Calendar of Events: There are still a few things that need to be cleaned up; the event display needs a few tweaks, and I need to make the error messages friendlier.