The below text is from a ticket I opened with Blackboard this morning. I used this unix command to dump a list of all supported browsers from the browserchecker.xml. grep -A 1 ‘supported=”true”‘ serverconfs/browserchecker.xml | grep descript | awk -F\> ‘{print $2}’ | awk -F\< ‘{print $1}’ The list of supported browsers does not match…
Occasionally I’ll want to see the usernames who use something like a user-agent property or were doing something during a range of time. Rather than report all the log lines and pick them out of the data, I use this which Blackboard (or maybe BEA added). Note  we’ve added user-agents to the webserver.log. The double…
A Weblogic managed node for a development cluster failed to shutdown when our shutdown script requested. The last managed node to shutdown becomes the JMS node and triggers a rewrite of the config.xml. We have scripts in place to check for the config.xml changing and alert us. Since I am the on call this week,…
A ticket landed at the DBA’s feet having to do with users not being able to login after logout. My first thought was it had to be the custom login page. So I recommended the Branding settings be checked that the same file id was used for both the login and logout pages. They were.…
Last week I posted on how to verify the cookie domain on nodes not just looking in the Ear file on the admin node. That same concept has another cool use: Verifying which VSTs the nodes actually have. Typically one-off updates from Blackboard has us run the updateWebctEar to replace classes in the war file.…
A couple thoughts about problems with Blackboard’s SafeAssign product. The product appears to be designed to be used by a single institution learning context from CE/Vista systems. We have an institution (InstA) which hosts collaborative programs. Faculty quite reasonably would like to use SafeAssign at InstA just like they do at their home institution (InstB). It appears…
Just finished a Oracle WebLogic Server 11g: Administration Essentials class today. So there are lots of things floating about in my head I want try. (Thankfully we have lots of development clusters for me to break beyond repair. Kidding. Sorta.) One of the common support questions Blackboard asks for those of us CE/Vista clients running…
One of the common complaints instructors have about CE/Vista is the Tracking reports don’t have recent enough data. They are shown this for selecting the date range. Including here the most recent time the tracking was processed (which the application already displays to the server administrator in background jobs) would help the instructor know whether…
There was an interesting question the other day about a student claiming CE/Vista lost the draft a student wrote. The administrator, Michael Scalero, wanted to know how we “administrators recover or assist users in gaining access to the content that the students (or instructors) have saved”. Part of my response was, Besides, CE/Vista isn’t designed for administrators…