The bug that was addressed on Sunday has apparently introduced a new problem to those beleagured T2000 servers. This time, the machines that were patched are having permission problems writing to the shared storage. In particular it’s affecting the ability to upload files in certain situations we don’t completely understand, yet.
For example, when an instructor creates a new content item, the WYSIWYG editor lets them attach one or more data files to the content item. When the item is submitted to Blackbaord, the files are uploaded to a temporary location that is local to one of the servers in the cluster. Once all the files are received by Blackboard and verified, they are copied to a more permanent location on the shared storage, so that all servers in the cluster can see them. The problem is that when the server the instructor was on is one of the affected T2000’s, the files aren’t copied correctly to the shared storage location, and broken links are the result for everyone who later clicks those links.
If you are an instructor who created content and are seeing this problem, please contact the Academic Computing Helpdesk at 974-1222 and one of the Blackboard administrators on duty can help recover the broken items.
The good news is that we still have the V440’s available, and they don’t suffer this problem. We’ve adjusted load balancing so that only the V440’s are serving blackboard, so there should be no new problems created.