Only 8 years into running this product and I still learn something new about it. Monday there was an event. Two nodes became responsive at about the same time. The other ten nodes did their jobs and transferred session information to the nodes taking on the sessions. Most were so busy they did not respond…
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.…
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…
It appears CE/Vista has several locations for defining the email addresses it uses for SMTP. $WEBCTDOMAIN/config/config.xml: mail.from= From address for messages sent. $WEBCTDOMAIN/customconfig/startup.properties: WEBCT_ADMIN_EMAIL= Some internal errors have a mailto: prompt to contact the server administrator. $WEBCTDOMAIN/serverconfs/log4j.properties: log4j.appender.EMail.To= Report fatal errors. $WEBCTDOMAIN/serverconfs/log4jstartup.properties: log4j.appender.EMail.To= Report fatal errors. $WEBCTDOMAIN/webctInstalledServer.properties: WEBCT_ADMIN_EMAIL= Installer picks up this value for populating…
I should know better than to trust documentation over my own intuition. Or to change based on what others tell me. I followed: Log in to Vista Enterprise as a Server Administrator or Institution Administrator. NOTE: To set glcid, you must log in as a Server Administrator. From the Administration tab, click the Utilities tab.…
Babies are fascinated by me. When the two of us are in a room, they often find me the most interesting thing in the room. Usually, it is mutual. So, a mutual friend of a friend, Mojan has a fantastic blog. The past year or so has been about being pregnant and most recently figuring…
Today I received an email announcing new certification courses from Blackboard. Every administrator around our system did as well. We have a large body of certified trainers and administrators with multiple individuals at every campus who have been through the certification plus all the functional support have been through both training and admin certification. I’m…