Blog from January, 2011

Following the application of a hotfix by Desire2Learn support staff, the display of profile pictures has been re-enabled in class rosters and other areas of Desire2Learn.

At the start of the Spring 2011 semester, Desire2Learn staff discovered a serious performance issue related to displaying profile pictures. Desire2Learn temporarily disabled the display of profile pictures system-wide while they developed, tested, and applied a fix for the problem. With that hotfix now in place, profile pictures are now being displayed again throughout Desire2Learn.

For approximately a week, new D2L course requests made in MAX were not being processed by Desire2Learn. Information Resources staff worked with tier three support staff at Desire2Learn to identify the problem as a failure in a data file parsing module. Once the problem was identified, Information Resources staff were able to adjust Banner's data export routines to avoid triggering the problem.

All course requests that had been queued during the outage were created and populated with students late on Monday, January 24. There are no outstanding issues related to the course creation outage, and all new course requests are being processed normally.

Information Resources staff apologize for the inconvenience the outage caused and are working with Desire2Learn on ways to catch and correct other problems more quickly in the future.

During the day on Tuesday, January 18, a problem at Desire2Learn's hosting center had prevented the delivery of any mail sent to or from Desire2Learn. Desire2Learn technical support staff resolved the issue by 5 PM Eastern that evening. All Desire2Learn mail had been queued during the outage and was delivered once service was restored.

Desire2Learn staff discovered a serious performance issue related to displaying profile pictures within class rosters and other areas of Desire2Learn. They have disabled the display of profile pictures system-wide until they can apply a fix for the problem. The fix is currently in testing and should be installed soon, though Information Technologies staff have not been given a date or time for its completion.

We apologize for the inconvenience in the meantime.