Rants, Raves, and Rhetoric v4

Category: Blackboard Vista

  • LDAP Fiasco

    Last week I logged into the ticket management system to look at updates to cases overnight and saw a pop-up for a “widespread issue”, basically two school, involving LDAP. So I looked up the case. The two schools were on the same cluster. Most likely the problem was on my end, which sucks. Security people…

  • The Cause

    Found I develop free software because of CUNY and Blackboard following the Blackboard security issues story. It is a really good blog post. This conclusion made me smile. I am certain there are plenty of people in the system I support who strongly agree. I just wish there was an easier way of finding and…

  • Blackboard Security

    Interesting articles accusing Blackboard of being lax about security. A Black Eye for Blackboard Over Its Response to Major Security Flaws which is about Millions of student exams, tests and data exposed. I saw the security bulletins, but I was not aware of the back story leading to why it was announced. We run an unaffected…

  • Smaller Java Cache

    One of our campus Blackboard Learning System Vista Enterprise administrators reported to have reduced the number of Java cache related issues (failed sessions) by changing the Disk Space Allotment from the 1,000 MB default down to 100 MB. This is found in the Java Control Panel > General tab > Temporary Internet Files: Settings. I…

  • Duplicate Selective Release

    Analyst asked me to look at the server logs for a case where students were getting system exceptions. Armed with the JSESSIONID, I found many cases in the webct.log of an error called: “Stack size too large”. In my old email, I found a September 2010 discussion with Rajini Prabhu and Mike Cooling about thread-dump analyzers. In it Rajini…

  • Open Letter Re: Behind the Blackboard

    Hi Blackboard Support, Today, without warning, you changed Behind the Blackboard. Clients dislike surprises. We like knowing how things work. Give us access to the new thing before we have to deal with it. That way we become familiar with it. Even if you do not give advance viewing of the service, then advance warning…

  • Bb Mobile Learn Phones Home

    We acquired Blackboard Mobile Learn Powerlink version 1.1.9 to solve a problem. Something was done on the Blackboard side before our institution administrators could successfully get to the registration page. This version fixed that issue by doing a registration behind the scenes. Naturally the information it has is wrong, but at least now the institution administrators can…

  • Browser Checker

    Mark Wescott wrote to a Blackboard Learn 9 list, Imagine a world where Bb Inc. provides browser checkers for each Rev/SP combo, and all we (aka “The Customers”) have to do is place a link on our Bb logon page to the browser checker that matches our production environment…. mmmm serenity. Said browser checkers would:…

  • Resolved

    Yesterday was the 100th day of the year, so I figured I would figure out my progress with those pesky resolutions. Complete unfinished novel series. I finished the Harry Potter series. I am simultaneously working on the Sword of Truth and Ender series. The Shadow Rising was such an awful book I gave up on…

  • Muzzled

    For over a month now my team has been heads down to provide some sandbox environments for the University System of Georgia Learning Management System Transition Task Force. The evaluators are looking at a sandbox for each contender. Various technical teams are also determining how the product fits with our experience and our operations. Growing…