CHIP Shuts Down Unexpectedly Blackboard Technician Saves the Day
By Jack Fallon '08
News Reporter
To the chagrin if many Choaties, CHIP went down last week for a longer period of time than was expected. This duration may have seemed intolerable to a few, but life at Choate continued and ITS had our beloved intranet back up soon.
The reason for the outage, in fact, can be attributed to the faculty. According to Director of ITS, Andrew Speyer, there was a problem with faculty member’s web pages made with Dreamweaver and hosted by CHIP. Some teachers had inadvertently used Dreamweaver to overwrite Blackboard code resulting in an code compatibility issue. A patch to fix the problem was initiated by a Blackboard worker after school which was only supposed to last about thirty minutes. However, the “computer that was running it… ran out of memory,” says Andrew Speyer, causing the delay. To address the problem a second-tier technician from Blackboard came to Choate and had CHIP back up in good time. Had the latter technician arrived on the scene from the first moment of the crisis, the holdup might never have happened, although at the time there was no apparent need for advanced service.
So what were the ramifications of CHIP going down? Though Choate is a school reliant on technology, the problems were few. Email was unaffected; students learned to access email by using the exchange address directly, without the link on the CHIP website. Many students keep copies of syllabi and other course documents such as science problem sets on their desktops, and so were able to complete homework assignments on time. Most sorely missed were links to websites for foreign language classes. Students experienced problems trying to watch “Destinos” videos and the like from external websites which required software such as plug-ins that students may not have had installed.
Teachers were generally understanding of problems. Says Mark Fromson’08 “My teacher, Mr. Larsen, gave the class an extension on the homework,” although many people “could get by with science.” Some students even appreciated the outage: Shelby Tulley ’08 says to ITS “Thank you for giving me more time on my homework.” This particular misfortune thus had a sliver lining.
