Blackboard, the North Dakota State class file and information sharing center, has been suffering random outages and will not be fixed until the middle of next week.

The outages will continue to occur in a “ballpark” of one or two times per school day, and affect about one-third of Blackboard users in the time, Marc Wallman, NDSU vice president for information technology said. He added that the outages will usually last from anywhere between 30 to 60 minutes.

The times Blackboard is affected also vary based on the day of the week, as class schedules are generally different from Monday-Wednesday-Friday classes than Tuesday-Thursday classes.

Problems with Blackboard first occurred on August 23, the first full day of classes for the semester.

Cause

Wallman said the problem is a software one, not hardware, which is occurring in one of three servers NDSU host and use to run Blackboard.

The software incorporated problems when Blackboard was updated the weekend of August 12. Blackboard updates either the weekend before Move-In Day or during semester breaks, Wallman said, adding this was because these times were the least disruptive for the majority of Blackboard users.

Issues emerge during the high traffic times at the beginning of semesters, as generally more people use Blackboard at the same time and will use it less as the semester progresses, he said.

Solution

“We can’t solve the problem ourselves,” Wallman said. He added that NDSU is “at the mercy of of the vendor right now,” in that only Blackboard can solve the problem.

“It’s probably a configuration, or a bug, or both, but if it’s a configuration thing it’s undocumented so we … don’t know what it is, and if it’s a bug, we can’t fix it because it’s not our code,” he said.

“We’re treating the symptoms right now,” Wallman said, adding, “if we can reduce the frequency (of outages), that’s our number one goal at this point.”

NDSU software engineers are working toward mitigating the issues with Blackboard, though it is “a big balancing act.”

Wallman said that if the engineers mitigate too much, problems could spread to the database server running Blackboard and could ruin the program entirely.

“If we push on one thing we’re worried it is going to send the problem somewhere else, and we’re trying to push on one thing and not have the problem move somewhere else,” he said.

Wallman said Blackboard has been in use since he first arrived at NDSU in 2002, and there have not been any problems this size in that time.