Archive for February, 2010
Update: ANGEL Secure Logon
Audience: All ANGEL users
UPDATE: ANGEL users using Internet Explorer may have experienced problems with the secure logon nugget, starting from 6pm Thursday night. A fix was applied at 8am Friday morning.
What: We’re phasing in a secure logon technology for ANGEL. It’s currently appearing on the ANGEL logon page as an additional control. Our plan is to evaluate it for a few days, and after a successful trial, remove the standard logon control. During this evaluation period both logon controls will appear on the ANGEL logon page.
This information is available from the More Info link on the control:
- Secure logon protects your ANGEL username and password from interception while logging in,
even if you are using an unsecured Wi-Fi network, such as is commonly available at coffee shops. To accomplish this, your account is first transmitted via a secure (SSL) connection and a one-time login token value is returned. Finally, this token is sent directly to ANGEL and you are logged in. All of this occurs without sending your account in clear text over the Internet.
Note that the ANGEL logon page itself is not SSL-secured; only the logon transaction uses SSL and so you will not see the secure site indicator in your browser, nor will this secure logon change any other feature in ANGEL.
What’s New/Task Hot Fix Install and Rollout Plan
Audience: All faculty, students and staff
What’s New/Task Hot Fix is now available in all domains in WAOL ANGEL.
Here’s the documentation that you can send to your faculty and students who use WAOL ANGEL (Changes to What New-Tasks)
WAOL staff rolled out the Hot Fix domain-by-domain over the last two weeks to make sure we did not see a degradation in performance as the function was restored. So far we have not seen any related technical problems.
If you do see any problems, however, please have your college domain administrator add information to this ANGEL support ticket: #596-8313119
Background: When WAOL ANGEL experienced performance problems in January, ANGEL suggested we turn off the What’s New/Tasks feature since this feature was programmed to search every classroom or group for changes every time a user logs in. We turned it off, and performance improved. The cost, however, was high in that faculty and students lost very useful tools. We asked ANGEL to provide What’s New/Tasks in a form that would work for our installation, and they did so by changing the What’s New/Tasks tool so it works on demand rather than running continuously.
We are sorry that this function was not available to faculty and students for several weeks this quarter, and we are glad that we now have all functions back.
Thanks for your patience and assistance as we worked toward this solution.
Support graphic for WAOL ANGEL
We’ve heard that there is some confusion about what the WAOL ANGEL collaborative tech support process looks like. So we’ve put together a graphic that we hope makes it more clear. Click the link below to view the graphic (which is also available under “Useful Links” in the sidebar)
ANGEL Secure Logon
Audience: All ANGEL users
UPDATE: ANGEL users using Internet Explorer may have experienced problems with the secure logon nugget, starting from 6pm Thursday night. A fix was applied at 8am Friday morning.
What: We’re phasing in a secure logon technology for ANGEL. It’s currently appearing on the ANGEL logon page as an additional control. Our plan is to evaluate it for a few days, and after a successful trial, remove the standard logon control. During this evaluation period both logon controls will appear on the ANGEL logon page.
This information is available from the More Info link on the control:
- Secure logon protects your ANGEL username and password from interception while logging in,
even if you are using an unsecured Wi-Fi network, such as is commonly available at coffee shops. To accomplish this, your account is first transmitted via a secure (SSL) connection and a one-time login token value is returned. Finally, this token is sent directly to ANGEL and you are logged in. All of this occurs without sending your account in clear text over the Internet.
Note that the ANGEL logon page itself is not SSL-secured; only the logon transaction uses SSL and so you will not see the secure site indicator in your browser.
ANGEL Slow – Update from Angel Support
Audience: All ANGEL users
What: WAOL ANGEL was slow and non-responsive intermittently Monday morning. ANGEL hosting reports the problem was caused at their site, and we believe it has now been fixed. Please let Presidium (866-425-8412) know if you continue to see slow performance.
WAOL ANGEL Maintenance Period 2/19/2010
Audience: All ANGEL Users
Announcement: This Friday, February 19th, ANGEL will be updating the firmware of some hardware devices in our environment. The maintenance window will occur between 3 am and 5 am EST. Please keep in mind that your site may be unavailable during this time period. Please note that this maintenance is on physical hardware only and no software updates or configuration changes will be applied to our ANGEL site during this period.
Spring Intent to Teach Forms Available
Audience: ELC and faculty teaching WAOL courses
Spring ITT’s are open and available to start submitting Intent to Teach (ITT) forms if you haven’t already.
Please submit requests now if you are using WAOL ID integration or are teaching WAOL shared or private courses. We need to have these requests in and approved before we can start accepting enrollments.
Remember students cannot register for the WAOL courses until they have the ITT in and approved by their college. A quick guide for instructor procedures can be found here:
http://www.waol.org/faculty_and_staff/instructorProcedure.aspx
Please login to your MyWAOL account using your Angel Login Credentials here:
http://waol.org/faculty_and_staff/index.aspx
WAOL Spring ’09 Classrooms being deleted tonight
Audience: ELC and instructors teaching on WAOL
Reminder: Just a quick note that the Spring 09 classrooms are scheduled to start being deleted (without backup) at 2 am Saturday morning. This means today is the last opportunity to export or backup this content.
WAOL ANGEL Back Up
Audience: All ANGEL users
What: WAOL ANGEL was offline for about 2 hours this morning due to a power loss at ANGEL hosting. WAOL ANGEL is back up now.
The ANGEL datacenter lost power early this morning.
Tacoma elearning staff put in a ticket at 7:16 am.
- Some network gear at ANGEL blew while ANGEL was switching to back up power.
- The gear was replaced and full connectivity restored by 8:46 PST.
- This outage was caused by a power loss, and affected all ANGEL hosted customers; it is not related to the
- Service Pack applied to WAOL ANGEL last night.
Thanks to Tacoma and other colleges that reported the system down in the ANGEL Support Portal and Presidium.
Here’s the full report from ANGEL Managed Hosting:
Today our datacenter experienced a power outage which caused our network to fail over to fault tolerant devices. Shortly after this failover, the environment had a power surge which physically damaged several networks switches. As the other fault tolerant devices were without power and the fail over devices were damaged, we were not able to recover quickly. We dispatched engineers to our datacenter and switched out the damaged devices as soon as possible to bring sites back up. We sincerely apologize for the outage. We are currently work with our data center to determine what happened to cause to power issues and to ensure an event like this cannot happen again.
Thanks,
Mark Thompson
Managed Hosting
Update on What’s New
Audience: All ANGEL Users
New Information: ANGEL has completed the adjustments to the What’s New features so that it will search for new items on demand. We applied the changes to the Tacoma domain this morning, and we will be monitoring WAOL ANGEL performance through Monday to see how use by just one college affects performance. So far so good!
If we do not see any new problems or slow performance over the weekend, we will begin to turn the revised feature on for each college domain.
What’s Next: First, it is very important that we get details of any performance issues between now and Tuesday morning. Please report any problems to the college help desk or WAOL Help Desk. ANGEL administrators, please post details in the existing ANGEL ticket.
Second, if this test is successful, we will begin to turn the feature back on college domain by college domain. Colleges will be informed before the revised feature will be turned back on for their domain. And we will also provide documentation for users.
