This week, we plan on finishing migrating the wikis off of Dreamhost by moving the remaining in house. There are 41 wikis that remain on wikis.ala.org. This will only affect wikis hosted on wikis.ala.org.
We will be able to do this with minimal outage. We will put the wikis into read only mode tomorrow morning. They will still be available, but they will not be editable. This will allow us to migrate them without losing any new changes that may be made. We anticipate the migration to take 2 days, Tuesday and Wednesday. At the end of the process, we will change the DNS which will take the new in house wikis live. At that time, the wikis will be editable.
Any delays in the DNS propagation will simply send users to the old read-only wikis. This will allow us to migrate them without the users noticing any downtime. The DNS propagation time varies. Traditionally, it has taken a few hours. However, under the worst circumstance, it can take up to 3 days.
Please contact me with any concerns.
Mediawiki installations are being upgraded to version 1.23.3 today. There should be no noticeable downtime as the upgrade rolls out. No interaction is required by users.
WordPress blogs have been upgraded to 3.8. There were no outages and everything seems to be in place. Please log into your blogs and update any modules that may be out of date.
1. Blog & Wiki Migrations (Rob)
The blog and wiki migration from Dreamhost to ALA servers has been put on the backburner due to other projects right now
We did a test moving the ITTS News blog, which was successful
We’ll work on this project after Midwinter
We have more than 80 blogs and more than 70 wikis, so this will be a long process because each site needs a little work in order to get it ready for migration
Rob will work with units individually because all of a unit’s sites on a single domain must be moved at once
wikis.ala.org will be the last site moved because it has 50 wikis on it
Moodle will remain hosted externally because we need additional support for it; we’re investigating specialty Moodle hosting services now
2. ALA Connect (Jenny)
Drupal 7 Upgrade
We’ve postponed the upgrade until the week of February 11th so that we can ensure proper testing and not run into any problems right before Midwinter
The change should be pretty seamless to users – the interface is the same, the functionality is the same, etc., so no major documentation or training should be necessary
Two things will be different, though:
Chats will work a little differently because that module was re-written by the author
Individual chats will now work like every other content type, so you’ll be able to create an individual chat from the “Add” button
You’ll also be able to categorize your chats using your group’s existing subject headings and chat transcripts will be searchable
Also, chats will appear on the group home page, so chats occurring now should be easier to find because they’ll appear as the new content at the top of the page
Email notifications will also change in Drupal 7 and hopefully will get easier to read
Because we’re using our own Drupal module now, we can format the notifications however we want (especially for digest versions)
In the weeks after the Drupal 7 launch, we’ll work on reformatting these emails
We want feedback about what users would like to see change with notifications, so we’ll do a survey of both members and staff to ask for suggestions
Connect-iMIS sync issue
Members and staff have reported enough problems with Connect rosters that we know there is some kind of an issue with the synchronization between iMIS and Connect
Since nothing has changed on either side recently and the problems appear to be random, it’s been very difficult to troubleshoot the problem
In February, we plan to pull together a group to work on resolving the issue
In the meantime, we’ve put every active committee member in the overnight sync in order to re-synchronize the rosters going into Midwinter
We also turned on email notifications from committees for every committee member as part of the re-synchronization
We believe that this will solve the problem short-term until we can implement a long-term fix, but it’s important for all staff liaisons to check their rosters to make sure they’re updated
Please report any problems to Jenny via Track-It so that we can continue logging issues and find the pattern
3. Reminder to access remote resources prior to leaving for Midwinter conference (Louise and Pam)
A reminder that the document for accessing remote resources can be found onĀ http://.ala.org/support
ITTS has moved the old support wiki into ala.org now that the ALA website is in Drupal 7
Pam has been working on updating the content and adding new information
The one thing to note is that there are pages that only staff can view; if you have a member account, you won’t be able to see the staff-only page
The “staff resources” area includes the “remote resources” page that can be very useful if you’re going to Midwinter
Note that you can’t test your NetStorage access to the LAN from inside the building – it only works externally
4. Review of New Hire Web Form (Louise)
We’ve moved the “New Hire” form to th3 “staff resources” section on the Support site (http://ala.org/support)
The great thing about this new form is that portions of it can be sent to whichever unit needs that information
Use this form for:
The form walks you through the various options for each type of request
Note that it isn’t quite ready to go live yet but will be soon
Question: When will the Outlook Address Book be cleaned up?
Answer: Not sure who has access to maintain that and authority to change it. We need a way to kludge together the Outlook Address Book, the KM staff directory, and the ala.org Contact Us list. Mary G. will look into who is responsible for what to sort this out because at least one of them needs to be reliably updated. Discussion about ways to do this, and we’ll try to work on this after Midwinter.
Drupal features you may not know about (Louise)
Louise showed how to:
Louise also discussed “microsites,” which are subsites that use a different template from the standard ala.org one
any unit can request a microsite, but please allow a minimum of two weeks notice so that ITTS has time to implement it before your deadline for it to be live
for a microsite, you’ll need to provide a banner, color scheme, and links; colors can be different from the ala.org template, but not font size
Virtual Meeting Software (Sherri)
Louise is configuring Adobe Connect
please make sure your staff list is current for your unit in the KM system because Louise is creating “groups” now
because of the way the Adobe Connect licensing works, we need to assign one person in each unit to be the main point of contact for using the software
Adobe is trying to convert our iLinc archives
all ALA staff are Adobe Connect users by default
we recommend you put your webinar materials in your unit’s shared folder so that anyone can get to it
Blogs & wikis (Sherri)
ITTS has found software to maintain our blogs and wikis in-house, so we’ll be migrating from DreamHost sometime in the near future
we’ll give plenty of notice and set up a schedule when we have more information
Rollout of network disk space (Sherri)
ITTS is moving files to a new storage location in order to add more storage space
this should stop the network full messages, but please take a few minutes to clean out any files you no longer need
RFPs (Sherri)
Sherri noted that we have several RFPs running right now
ALA Connect (Jenny)
Jenny will hold additional sessions on the redesign in a few weeks
I am rolling out an upgrade to WordPress 3.4.2. This contains some bug fixes and security fixes.
Everyone should take this opportunity to log into their blogs and check for pending updates to themes and plugins.
Dreamhost was able to bring the Moodle server back up. Classes.ala.org is now operational.
The server hosting classes.ala.org is currently down. Moodle is unreachable. An emergency support request has been filed with Dreamhost.
Starting immediately, I am rolling out an upgrade to WordPress 3.3.2. Blogs may experience a 30s outage while it is being updated.
Please take this time to log into your blog and update all themes and plugins. These are vital to keep up to date and prevent malicious users from exploiting security holes.
The host server was suffering a load issue. Dreamhost has resolved the issue and the server is now back up.