Blog from February, 2014

Faculty:

You may now use MAX to request Summer 1, Summer 2, and Summer 3 2014 Desire2Learn shells.

• The instructions for requesting courses are available in the D2L Resources wiki.
• As you make a course request in MAX, the D2L Course tool there will present you with a default name for your new shell, and at that time, you can adjust the name as you like. If you accidentally skip that renaming opportunity, or decide upon a better name later, you can rename your course shell right from within Desire2Learn.
• If you want to combine two or more sections (CRNs) into a single Desire2Learn shell, please use the combined course request option in MAX's D2L Course tool. Attempting to combine shells after they have been created will take days away from the time you have to work on building your course and may force you to re-upload or recreate course materials.
• While the D2L Course tool in MAX won't let you and a colleague combine your sections into one Desire2Learn shell, the help desk can assist with that. So if you want to combine sections with a colleague, please do not request independent shells using MAX. Contact the help desk with your request.
• If you have any questions, please contact the help desk.

You may once again access Desire2Learn normally using the grey "Login" button. The "Internal Error" problem has been resolved.

Support staff from Millersville, Desire2Learn, and a hosting provider with whom Millersville contracts worked together to identify and correct a problem with an authentication server. Once the authentication server was fixed, the normal Desire2Learn login process began working again.

Information Technology staff are working with support staff at the hosting provider to determine what caused the authentication server to malfunction last night. Once the cause is determined, we will work to ensure the problem does not happen again in the future.

Issue:
Desire2Learn (D2L) is not accepting login credentials through our authentication method called Shibboleth.

Timeframe:
Access to D2L stopped around 8:00 pm on Friday, Feb 21 and is still unavailable.

User Impact:
Users cannot access D2L courses or information. Individuals receive an error when they attempt to login into the system and asked to contact technical support.

Recovery Action:
Tier 3 Desire2Learn technicians are working with Shibboleth technicians to resolve the issue. Technicians have been working on this issue throughout the night and are continuing to work on a resolution today.

Workaround:
Please use the "Guest Login" link below the grey Login button to access your D2L courses.

We apologize for any inconvenience and appreciate your understanding.

UPDATE 22 February 2014, 4:29 a.m. Eastern: Desire2Learn technicians continue to work to resolve the login error.

At this time, an internal error is preventing most users from logging in to Desire2Learn. The error message displayed is "Error: Internal Error".

Millersville University and Desire2Learn are currently investigating the problem.

The Desire2Learn system is still online, and anyone who is already logged in will be able to continue to use Desire2Learn. Additionally, guest accounts may log in to Desire2Learn normally. No course content, student data, or grades will be lost or impacted by this login problem.

Technical support staff at Millersville and Desire2Learn have completed the security certificate update process, and as a result, Desire2Learn now accepts logins again.

Millersville Information Technologies staff will be establishing new security certificate update procedures so as to avoid repeating this outage in the future.

UPDATE on 20 Feb 2014, 11:05am Eastern: This issue has been resolved. Desire2Learn logins are working again.

At this time, an error message will appear when you try to log in to Desire2Learn. The error message will be, "An unexpected error has occurred".

Millersville University and Desire2Learn are currently updating the security certificate that protects your password when you log in to Desire2Learn. Until the new certificate is copied to every server involved in the login process, logins will fail with the error message above.

The Desire2Learn system is still online, and anyone who is already logged in will be able to continue to use Desire2Learn. No course content, student data, or grades will be lost or impacted by this certificate update or login error. Only new login attempts are affected.

Technical support staff at Millersville and Desire2Learn are working to complete the certificate update process as quickly as possible.