We have an "Educational Technology Unit" responsible (together with our "Information and Computing Technology" department) for running a Blackboard system. Bb5 was running reasonably well last academic year so we upgraded to Bb6 over the summer ... typically without "full load" testing it appears. As reported all over the world where Bb is deployed Bb6 was originally unable to correctly delete idle sessions so tends to slow down and eventually fall-over as sessions are used up. A patch from Bb was installed here 5 weeks ago (a 30 minute interval garbage collection script with consequent performance issues) and a "solution" upgrade installed last week. This seems to have helped prevent periodic crashes but the system remains unstable (slow response times are the norm.)
The shocking thing for a supposedly secure system is that SSL was disabled in the original install, reinstated (after 3 months) last week and removed again this week! WTF is going-on?! Am I just naïve to expect a secure system? It's certain that the "upgrade" has introduced a few genuinely useful features but at a terrific performance cost & a disturbing loss of security ... Rather ironically & inaccurately the Blackboard site currently leads with Blackboard offers the mission critical applications for building today's digital campus
.
No comments:
Post a Comment