Friday, 13 April 2012

To all UWA Students and Staff

Dear All,

Information Services extends our apologies to students and staff who have been inconvenienced by system outages or access issues in the early weeks of first semester.

While every effort was undertaken to minimise the impact of major service changes implemented for 2012, unexpected issues occurred once all new systems were in combined operation under the load of a full student cohort and lecture schedule.

We have been working frantically to address these issues, and believe that we have returned stability to the affected systems.

We thank you for your patience, and would like to take this opportunity to share with you the enormity of the service changes that came to fruition for first semester. These changes were implemented by Information Services in collaboration with Faculty IT and the Centre for Advancement of Teaching and Learning, to provide alignment for New Courses 2012, and to greatly enhance the UWA IT infrastructure and its effective management,  as an enabler for improved services for the support of research and teaching into the future.

So what exactly changed in 2012 that resulted in the disruptions to service?

  • Migration of Faculties and Schools to the new UWA network over the summer break.  While these migrations have largely been successful, teething problems emerged in some areas, mainly due to the complexities within some Faculty networks, and the need to also continue operation of the old network until all business unit network migrations are complete.
  • Migration of all student and staff network file storage to the New Institutional Data Centre . A device failure at the data centre on Tuesday  evening 27th March resulted in a number of staff and students unable to access their network storage. This was addressed as a Critical Incident, and service was fully restored within 1.5 hours.  Investigation is underway to determine why service fail-over to another device did not occur as expected.
  • All student allocated PC’s in labs and libraries (some 3,500 PC’s) were rebuilt and reconfigured to:
    • Operate over the new University Network to the new UWA Institutional Data Centre.
    • Authenticate students to the new consolidated UniWA directory (allowing students access to any of these PC’s and new services with the one login)
    • Provide a Home drive disk mapping to 2GB of storage for each student in the new Institutional Data Centre (enabling student access to their home storage from anywhere)
    • Direct print requests from these PC’s to a new Student Printing System, where printouts can be collected from any student printer on campus using CampusCard to release and pay for printouts.
    • As a result, all students have more equitable access to IT services from any student lab location.
  • A new Student Printing System connecting some 120 printers across 90 student lab and library locations to one centrally managed print service. This provides a consistent, flexible and convenient solution for student printing needs. Student printouts are sent to a secure “global” queue, and the student can then select to physically print their documents from any student printer up to 12 hours later, using their Campus Card for access. Printing costs (which are now generally lower than previous print charges) and “how to use” are now standardised on all printers.
  • A major upgrade to the Campus Card system to provide more reliable cash loading equipment, and to provide EFTPOS and online funds transfer facilities for improved convenience and access from anywhere. CampusCard now provides enhanced support for the new Student Printing System.  A number of students are awaiting transfer of fund balances from previous Faculty print solutions to their CampusCard balance. This activity is underway and these balances should be available on CampusCard shortly.  These students are reminded that their CampusCard needs to be activated in the new Campus Card system before the old balances can be transferred.
  • Implementation of a new Lecture Capture System (Echo360) fully integrated to the time tabling system to enable automatic recording of all scheduled lectures within Echo enabled venues.  This new service is hosted from the new UWA Institutional  Data Centre  and accessed across the new UWA network.  Automatic recording of scheduled lectures has resulted in a threefold increase in the number of lecture recordings, with an average of 865 lecture recordings being processed each week.  This volume introduced a few initial performance challenges, which have been resolved.
  • Implementation of a new Learning Management System (Moodle) managed by the Centre for Advanced Teaching and Learning (CATL), and integration to the New Lecture Capture system. CATL staff have been working very closely with academics to assist in the utilisation of the new LMS.
  • Bedding down these new services was further compounded by Unifi authentication issues that manifested from unprecedented growth in the number of mobile devices automatically authenticating to Unifi, both staff and students.  Many people are now carrying 2 mobile devices, such as a smartphone and a tablet device, which are set to automatically connect to Unifi when within range.   This has resulted in significant load increase on the front end authentication for Unifi.  Our system currently limits users to 2 wireless devices at any one time. As such anyone already automatically connected by their smartphone and tablet device (even if not in active use), are prevented from also authenticating from their laptop.  This limit is currently under review.

Information Services have either resolved or implemented workarounds for the majority of issues, and are continuing to implement the required improvements to address identified problems.

We trust that your access to required services is now relatively trouble-free and that we can look forward positively to the added benefits to be achieved through the new service implementations.

Please feel free to contact the Service Desk, [email protected] , regarding any outstanding issues that have not been resolved to your satisfaction.

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Business Information and Technology Services — University Library