The Blackboard Copy Problem
Contents |
Background
In the lead up to T3, 2008 CQU's installation of Blackboard had a major problem with its "course copy" functionality. This is the function that allows staff to copy content from one course website to another. It is used a great deal to copy content from a previous offering to the new offering.
The problem was that most of the copy process was working except for attached files. i.e. any file (Word document, PDF, image, Powerpoint file etc.) that was uploaded by the staff to the original course.
These attached files would appear to have been copied. However, any attempt to access the file would lead to a "resource not found" error.
Problem Fixed
The problem was fixed on the 7th November, 2008 with assistance from Blackboard technical support.
ITD and DTLS staff are currently
- Running a diagnostic to identify courses which may be suffering the results of this problem.
- Contacting the relevant course coordinators to organise solutions.
Explanation
Blackboard technical support explained the problem as
- there appears to be a misconfigured development server running and connected to your production database. When this server processes a queued task, it results in the file system copy failures you have reported.
An expanded explanation
The version of Blackboard staff and students use is actually hosted on two computers configured to work closely and consistently together.
There are also other versions of Blackboard at CQU which are used for development and testing.
When a course copy is started by a staff member, this request gets put into a queue which should be processed by one of the computers on the live version of Blackboard.
For some reason, one of the development servers was also connected to this course copy queue.
It would regularly see a course copy request, grab it and perform the copy.
At this stage, I believe the following would happen.
The development server was connected to the live database. So much of the copying would succeed.
This includes telling the database that any attached files should existing on the hard drive.
However, the development server was not connected (or not able to write) to the hard drive for the live server.
So the files would not actually be there.
