GDNM.org Downtime
Hello all,
Many of you have noticed unacceptable levels of down time over the past month, including early morning on hand in day at the end of last term, and most of this week. This has been due to a variety of issues related to the Apache web server that we use to serve pages to you from our Mac Mini in Portsmouth.
Although we don’t like making our excuses it is important to realise that none of us are professional server administrators and yet we have managed to build what we feel is quite an amazing resource for the three courses. GDNM.org is an experiment in what the ‘bigwigs’ (yes I used ironic air quotes) like to call a VLE (Virtual Learning Environment) like Blackboard (a.k.a. myUCA) but sometimes experiments go a little wrong, and we are doing our best to make it awesome!
Speaking of awesome, we’ve been working extra hard this last week to get GDNM.org back on the rails. Starting with a impromptu visit to Portsmouth to spend the day poking the server into life again and working long hours remotely to reconfigure the server to work, and we’re not done there, we plan to visit the server again in the next week or so to install more RAM and hopefully a new remote reboot option so we can remotely push the power button via text message no less!
We are extremely sorry for the problems you’ve been experiencing with the website and while the site is backup now we aren’t fully confident that we are out of the woods yet.
We ask you to go about your normal business on the site so we can test the server over the next week or two and see how things pan out, if we experience lots more issues we have a backup plan to move the site to another server in London however this is troublesome so we are holding it in reserve.
If at any stage the site goes down as always you can email admin@gdnm.org (hosted separately from the main site) and you can follow us via Twitter @gdnm_uca.
Hopefully no one noticed too much as you were too busy enjoying your holidays, we are sure that the worst of the issues are behind us for now but please bear with us as we work to resolve these issues and have a happy new year!
Tom, Luke and Ben!
p.s. Admin Cat (a.k.a. Smudge is doing much better and it turned out he had a nasty virus but he is recovering now!)
