Credit: Courtesy of OSU.
Carmen is back online after a six-day outage.
As of Friday evening, the website — which is used for file sharing, quizzes and grade postings between professors and students — was accessible once again. Officials originally expected the website to be up by Thursday.
According to a Friday post on the Office of Distance Education and eLearning website, the database — which is what stores most of the course material, including grades, quizzes and news items and discussions — was not affected by the outage.
The file server — which stores all uploaded files — was affected. The ODEE website said that files uploaded before Nov. 3 were recovered — however, files uploaded in Carmen’s dropbox, content, news or discussions between Nov. 3-8 might be missing.
Files will continue to be restored from the temp directory over the next several days, according to the ODEE website.
The team won’t know for sure what caused the problem until next week when they run root cause analysis — a method of problem-solving to determine what created the complication. But Mike Hofherr — vice president and chief information officer — said the team does know that the problem occurred in the storage unit where Carmen is stored and affected multiple copies of the Carmen data, forcing the team to use a slower method than just restoring from Carmen’s primary backup to recover the data.
OCIO and the ODEE worked with Veritas Storage Foundation, Microsoft and Desire2Learn to bring Carmen back up, according to a Friday email from OCIO spokeswoman, Kate Keune.
