News

Maintenance period scheduled for evening of Thursday, February 23

Submitted by Adam Jensen on Mon, 02/20/2012 - 09:59

This coming Thursday (February 23) we're going to be moving our primary network-attached storage (NAS) server to a new network location; during this process, all websites on our hosting service will be temporarily unavailable.

We're going to be taking our service down at around 11:00pm on Thursday evening. When that happens, all affected websites will begin to serve up a standard maintenance page instead of their usual content. Officially, the maintenance window will be scheduled from 11:00pm on Thursday to 3:00am Friday morning; however, we anticipate that the outage will only last for about 30 minutes while we get the network reconfigured.

All CWS-hosted websites will be affected by this outage, including the UNT home page at www.unt.edu. If you have any questions or concerns about this process, please feel free to submit a ticket asking for more information.

Thanks!
the CWS team

Microsoft SQL outage (resolved)

Submitted by Adam Jensen on Thu, 01/12/2012 - 11:06

Hello!

Early this morning the CWS Microsoft SQL server became unavailable due to a serious hardware failure. Fortunately, we were able to move all the remaining hardware components into a new chassis, resulting in a full restoration of service.

This outage impacted any CWS-hosted web site that utilizes Microsoft SQL Server as its backend database, as well as any other site depending on those sites for information. For example, the news links on the UNT home page are provided by inthenews.unt.edu, which relies on Microsoft SQL Server for its backend data storage.

No CWS-hosted Drupal sites were affected, nor were any other web sites that utilize our MySQL service instead of Microsoft SQL Server. This unaffected group represents the majority of our hosting service, as we are currently in the process of migrating our Microsoft SQL services to another ITSS provider.

If you are still depending on CWS's Microsoft SQL service for your web site, we recommend you contact us as soon as possible so that we can ensure you're aware of our future plans for that service, and that your needs can still be met.

Thanks! the CWS team

PS - here's the BBQ'd processor, to the left. It got so hot it welded itself to the heatsink, and it fried the motherboard too. Burnt out processor core

State of the Web 2012

Submitted by Adam Jensen on Fri, 01/06/2012 - 13:09

The new year promises to be an interesting one for web services around the UNT System. We're hosting more web sites than ever before, including several for UNT Dallas, UNT Health Science Center, and various entities at the System level. I'd like to take this opportunity to share a little bit about where we are today, as well as where we're headed in the coming year.

Responsibilities of Web Site Builders

Consider the following scenario. Let's say that you're serving as the custodian for your unit's web site, and you've decided that it needs a bit of an overhaul. Rather than redoing the entire site yourself, you decide to hire a private web development firm to do the initial design work and technical implementation. A few months and more than a few meetings later, your new site is ready to go. You get it uploaded to our servers, plug in the content, and everything's great. Unfortunately, it doesn't stay that way; several months later you discover a serious problem with the site. The problem needs to be solved, and fast —but by whom? Since you didn't build it, you can't easily fix it yourself; and if it wasn't built in Drupal, there's not a whole lot of support that we here at CWS can offer either (see our SLA for more details). The fact is, the only people who really know how your site works are the people who built it: the private development firm. But will they help? If not, what do you do?

UNT Web Support Office Hours

In Person Help

Central Web Services and the Web Development Center have folks on hand to answer your questions every Wednesday between 10:30am and 12:00pm in the Business Leadership Building, Room 205.

Walk up the main stairwell in the Business Leadership Building, on the second floor enter the first glass door on your left (Graduate Programs, Department Chairs, Department Advising), walk straight and take a left all the way down the hallway to Conference Room 205 which will be on the right.