Yesterday at approximately 4 pm Datatel decided to take a hiatus.  When Datatel takes a break so does Merlin.  ITS staff immediately worked to resolved the problem but it took until 9:35 pm to get everything back up and running.  The problems are being caused by the APP listeners (an object in a computer program that observes functions, like a user action, and then distributes that action to the appropriate  device).  We will contact Datatel and see if they have a resolution to this problem as in the words of my staff, "I have no freakin clue why they finally came up."  That is tech talk for I hope that never happens again!

 

You may not know this but ITS often has to help other computer installations resolve their problems in order to solve our own.  For instance,  a school district was rejecting email from NCC.  As the ITS staff looked into the problem we found that all of our computer systems were working properly so the problem was not on our end of things. ITS put in a workaround, which we were not happy with since it will break if that school district changes the location of the primary DNS server for their domains.  ITS felt this solution was better than having our email rejected.

 

We then called the school district to inform them that there was a problem on their end of things because all our email was being rejected by them.  Since we could do nothing on our end but put in a workaround, we then researched the problem and suggested to them how to fix it on their end.  Their replay "Thanks for the good research into this issue.  We will dig into it the rest of the week."