Category: System Status

All Bionic services will be unavailable to both Bryn Mawr and Haverford from 8:00 a.m. until noon on Saturday, October 31. LITS will be performing necessary maintenance at this time.

With any questions, please contact the Help Desk at 610-526-7440 or help@brynmawr.edu.

Updated 10/13 at 3:40pm:

We have restored access to the VPN and all connections appear to be going through as normal. Thank you for your patience as we chased down and worked through this issue.

Please report any lingering problems or questions to the Help Desk.

Updated 10/13 10:30am:

Rebooting the VPN did not resolve the issue. Some connection attempts are eventually successful, but only after significant delay. LITS staff are continuing to investigate the issue, and we will post updates here as more information is available.

Community members are currently having problems connecting to the College’s VPN. As a first attempt to resolve the issue, LITS will be rebooting the VPN at 9:30 a.m. today (Tuesday 10/13). This outage will be momentary, but may disconnect those who are already connected.

We will share progress on resolution shortly.

Contact the Help Desk with questions: help@brynmawr.edu or 610-526-7440.

LITS has been trying to diagnosis and fix the problem causing Moodle to crash intermittently. Our research and testing has identified the PDF converter, which converts Assignments submitted in file formats other than PDF (e.g. Word docs, JPGs, etc.) to PDF so that they can be annotated within Moodle, as a likely contributor.

We disabled this feature as an emergency measure at 9 pm on Wednesday. We will need to leave it off for several days to determine the effects and may need to disable it permanently if we confirm that it was contributing to Moodle’s instability.

While Assignment conversion to PDF is disabled:

• Instructors will need to download assignments submitted in file formats other than PDF to annotate them and re-upload the annotated file to Moodle to return them to students.
• As an alternative, instructors can set up future assignments so that students are required to submit files in PDF format.
• Students can save, export or print as PDF from almost any application.
• For handwritten work, students can use free smart phone scanning apps to combine photos into a multi-page PDF document.  On campus students can also scan documents to PDFs using the Canon multifunction copier/printers in the libraries.

If you have any questions, please contact the Help Desk at help@brynmawr.edu or 610-526-7440.

Moodle was briefly unavailable a few times over the weekend. We are continuing to investigate the cause of the issue and will provide more information when we have it.

Contact the Help Desk with questions: help@brynmawr.edu or 610-526-7440.

Update: Moodle is now back up and running. If you’re still having trouble, please reach out to the Help Desk.

Please note that from 9pm – 10pm tonight (Friday, October 2nd), Haverford will be performing necessary maintenance on their Moodle site, moodle.haverford.edu. This should not affect access to Bryn Mawr Moodle courses.

Starting this afternoon, community members began experiencing issues reaching moodle.brynmawr.edu and logging in to the site. LITS staff members are actively looking into the issue and working to resolve it. We’ll update as soon as we know more.

Please contact the Help Desk with any questions, 610-526-7440 or help@brynmawr.edu.

Routine system maintenance generally occurs on the 2nd and 4th Thursday of each month from 6:00 p.m. – midnight. LITS implemented this practice in June 2015 to reduce overall system downtime, to improve the security and reliability of College systems and networks, and to maintain compliance with industry and vendor support requirements and best practices.

2021 Schedule:

Jan 14, 28

Feb 18, 25 – updated from Feb 11 to Feb 18 in January 2021 to reflect shifted start of spring semester

Mar 11, 25

Apr 14, 22

Jun 10, 24

Jul 15, 29

Aug 12, 26

Sept 16, 30

Oct 14, 28

Nov 11, 18

Update, 9/29: As of early this morning, Microsoft believes they resolved all connection and login issues. If you’re still having trouble, please contact the Help Desk.

Update: The issue appears to be Microsoft-wide and they are investigating and working to resolve it.

This evening, community members have started experiencing issues accessing their email via webmail.brynmawr.edu. We are actively looking in to the issue and trying to identify a cause. Updates will be posted here as they are available.

Email clients and mobile apps appear to be working normally.

If you have any questions, please reach out to the Help Desk: 610-526-7440, help@brynmawr.edu.

The Web Services team will complete a months-long upgrade of the Bryn Mawr Blogs on Wendesday, September 23, 2020. The upgrade involves migrating the Blogs from aging servers and outdated software to new, up-to-date virtual machines running the latest versions of MariaDB, PHP, and Linux. The upgrades should provide a more performant, secure, and reliable reliable service to Blogs users and the wider Bryn Mawr Community that relies on this service.

Between 7 and 11 am on Sept 23, 2020, Blogs will be affected in the following ways:

• Users will not be able to log in to any Bryn Mawr blogs or edit content.
• Users that are logged in at that time will be forcibly logged out.
• Already existing content from the Blogs will still be available for Blogs visitors. This is only an editing freeze.

The Web Services team expects that users will be able to log in and edit content on Blogs again no later than 11 am.

As always, please reach out to help@brynmawr.edu with any questions.

We have received numerous reports from instructors and students about access to Panopto videos. There are a few known issues that Panopto tech support is working to diagnose and fix. In the meantime, here are two workarounds that will fix many problems:

1. By design, Panopto creates an account for course participants (if needed) and grants them access to course videos the first time they click on a link in the Panopto block in a Moodle course. If you are having difficulty accessing videos, try clicking the link to a recording in the Panopto block in one of your Moodle courses.
2. As a workaround for video access issues, instructors can get a Panopto share link that works for Anyone who has the link and add it to a course page as a URL resource. (Turn editing on, then click Add activity or resource and choose URL)

We will post more information as we have it from Panopto.

Contact the Help Desk with questions: help@brynmawr.edu or 610-526-7440.