Author Archives: Tucker MacNeill

Turnitin Service Disruption

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This from Turnitin at 20:00 on the 12th of August:

“Incident resolved

Due to an unexpected third party intermittent service degradation, users of Turnitin, Turnitin UK, & iThenticate may be experiencing sporadic network issues while trying to use the service.

We are pleased to advise that the service has been restored.

We encountered a degradation between the following times:
BST August 12th 18:10 – August 12th 19:06

Please accept our apologies if you were impacted by today’s degradation”

Panopto EU Cloud full outage

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Incident Update

Panopto Cloud Operations Status

Current Status: Operational

Affected Infrastructure
Components: Website, Video playback, Search, Recording / Uploading, Processing / Encoding, Integrations
Locations: Europe (EU)

On 2021-08-11 from 21:48 UTC to 22:07 UTC, the Panopto EU Cloud had a full site outage. All users were unable to access their sites, including being unable to view, edit or upload new recordings.

RCA: Starting at 21:48 UTC, the Panopto EU Cloud web servers received a surge of incoming requests. Each of these requests required handling by a subservice, and thus resulted in requests being sent from the web servers to that subservice. Due to both the large quantity of requests and the processing cost of handling these requests, the subservice quickly became backlogged leading to elevated latencies in handling requests. Complicating that, a configuration flaw in the web servers made it so these long-running requests were not terminated in a timely manner, and the web servers quickly became backlogged and unable to handle general site traffic. Our operations team mitigated the issue by manually scaling servers to exceed the demands of the temporary surge of requests.

To prevent a recurrence of this issue, our cloud operations team will update the web server configurations to ensure subservice requests have appropriate timeouts.

16-07-21 – Disruption to service for My Studies (Blackboard) and Turnitin

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At approximately 17:30 on Friday, 16th of July, a data-centre in Amsterdam lost connectivity. This brought down Blackboard across most of the European region.

Blackboard were able to re-enable their data-centre, and services were restored by 19:30 on the 16th, for a total of 2 hours of downtime for the service.

Blackboard has apologised for the issue.

Note that My Studies, and thus Turnitin, were therefore unavailable for two hours on Friday the 16th, and student’s may have encountered problems submitting re-sits or other assessments during that outage.

Panopto New Features and Important Summer Dates

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Panopto Logo

 

 

Panopto Downtime:

On Saturday, June 26th Panopto will be down for maintenance and for the installation of new features for the service. They believe the downtime will only run for about 4 hours, and will start at 10pm BST on the 26th.

During the downtime, you will not be able to access videos on your Panopto site and any attempts to upload from recording clients will result in a “Server unable to connect” message

Although it’s unfortunate that the service will be down, the features that will be arriving upon the upgrade are quite nice, and many have been things that staff have been requesting/hoping for for a while.

New Features:

• Multi-stream mobile and embed viewer — Exciting changes are coming to mobile devices and the Panopto embed viewer. Users will get a fully interactive multi-stream experience that allows them to dynamically control which streams are displayed and to cycle through visual layouts. Linked Youtube videos are also now supported in this viewer, along with the full suite of features available in Panopto’s interactive desktop viewer.

• Discussion Moderation — Content creators can moderate discussions for both live webcasts and on-demand videos, controlling which discussion comments are visible to the full audience of viewers.

• Multi-stream preview in Capture — After recording a video with Capture, users will now see all of their recorded streams in the preview viewer to increase confidence that all of their content has been captured correctly.

• Improved Sharing Experience — In response to usability feedback from users, we have revamped the sharing experience to be more intuitive and to use a modernized look and feel.

• Multi-Language Search — Users can specify the content language for each folder, enabling Panopto’s Smart Search and speech-to-text processing in multiple languages within the same site.

• Join or resume a session using Capture — Users can now use Capture to create distributed recordings, joining an in-progress recording or resuming a previous recording, right from the video library.

• Improved clips ordering — Users can now drag and drop clips to the desired location from the timeline UI in the editor.

• Mobile apps: Background/Reliable Upload & Share — Panopto’s mobile app now allows users to create recordings of unlimited duration and will upload videos while the app is in the background. Users can also easily share videos from within the app.

Some of these features will take a bit of time to wrap our heads around them, but Panopto believes that their service will be even easier and better to use.

Mandatory Client Upgrade

On Friday, July 16, we will require Panopto for Windows & Remote Recorders to be upgraded to version 9.0.2 or above and Panopto for Mac to version 10.1.0 or above.
The upgrade will be applied to your Panopto site at 12 midnight GMT/1:00 am BST.

To update your Panopto Recorder, go into a module with Panopto Video enabled. Click on Panopto Video to go to the Panopto Content area of the module (1) and then click on the Go to Panopto button in the upper right (2).

Screencapture of a module area with Panopto Video link and the expand button being highlighted

Once you’re in the Panopto Area, click on the “Download” button under your name in the top-right.

Screencapture of the download panopto video button under the users' name

Click the green Download button.

Screencapture of the green coloured download button

Double-click to launch the installer application

Screencapture of the downloaded exe file installer

Follow the onscreen-prompts to install the software.

Note: If you are prompted to enter a password to install this update, you MAY have to contact the Service Desk if the computer doesn’t allow you to run the installer.

Blank Video problem with MS Teams recordings

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We’ve received reports of “Blank Video” recordings in Teams, when sharing a Powerpoint in the session… When using a Windows 10 machine. (This issue does not seem to effect a Mac)

If you are running sessions in Teams, and wish to have successful recordings of the session, instead of sharing a Powerpoint, rather either “Share Window” or “Share Desktop” in the team-call when recording is needed, until this issue is resolved.

microsoft teams sharing image, showing to not use the powerpoint option

Turnitin Bulk Download errors reported 03-03-21

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Some schools rely on the bulk download of the GradeMark papers (as in the PDF format capturing the marks, feedback, and annotation applied in Turnitin).

As of last week we have found that they can no longer produce bulk downloads which are made available via the ‘Messages’ section above the tabs in any Turnitin Submission Point Inbox. Each time you trigger a bulk download it does one of three things:

  • The bulk download never generates and you do not receive a message, even after waiting for several hours.
  • The download generates but with errors, so only a tiny fraction of the papers (2 out of x) are included in the resulting zip file and the manifest (txt) in the zip file indicates a few of the errors but not all of them. The message received indicates that there were errors, as shown in the screenshot below.

Screenshot of bulk download errors

  • You receive a message stating that the files failed to compress, as shown in the screenshot below.

Screenshot of a turnitin page error showing a failure of the bulk download zip file

A ticket has been raised with Turnitin.

The only work around for this issue, is to download the papers needed, one at a time…

RESOLVED: Panopto Recorder version 9 for Windows – Known Issue

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Panopto have released an update to the Recorder for Windows that fixes the issues.

Last week we discussed the bug affecting Panopto for Windows and PPT. I wanted to let you know in case you missed the updated in the forums, this was fixed in Friday’s release:

We have had reports from academic staff about issues with Panopto Recorder when recording Powerpoint lectures, where the slides are NOT recorded and the resulting video is simply a blank screen with the lecturer’s voice only as a ‘voice over’.

In diagnosing this issue, we have discovered that it is a known-bug (problem) that is being worked on by Panopto Engineers.

Our advice:

  1. Do not update to Panopto Recorder for Windows 9. No matter how often you are prompted to do so. Just ignore the prompt.
  2. If you’ve already updated, Choose to record BOTH from Main Screen and Powerpoint
    Screencapture showing both the Main Screen and Powerpoint tickboxes ticked in the Secondary Source area of the window
  3. Or, to download the Powerpoint from your OneDrive onto the desktop of your local computer and run the presentation from your computer. The issue only effects Powerpoint files that are located in a networked drive, like OneDrive or DropBox.

Here’s the link to the Panopto Community site discussing the issue:

Community Panopto

Issues affecting Panopto Video search capabilities Jan-Feb 2021

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Panopto is cognisant of continued issues with their ‘Search Functionality’ across the EU and Britain.  They have engineers building new systems, and server cascade responses to mitigate the issue.

Every three or so days since January 20th, we’ve been receiving these messages from Panopoto:

Incident Update
Panopto Cloud Operations Status

Current Status: Partial Service Disruption

Affected Infrastructure
Components: Search
Locations: Europe (EU)

Update:
The Panopto EU Cloud is experiencing an increased error rate in search.

The issue seems to be ongoing. If you have issues ‘searching’ your videos, please be patient, the ability will most probably return upon the next time you log in to My Studies.

Turnitin Service Disruption

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12th January from 15:45 – 19:00 Turnitin Service Disruption reported.

Turnitin reports that their own systems were not effected, however a broader Data Centre issue in London could have affected access to Turnitin services.

From Turnitin:

TurnitinStatus's avatar

We have been made aware that a number of users are experiencing intermittent issues whilst trying to use Turnitin. This is an ongoing issue affecting a large number of companies/services across the internet and is not specific to Turnitin.

Panopto Service Disruption 22nd Dec, 2020

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On Dec 22nd 2020 between 22:05 and 22:25PM GMT, the Panopto EU Cloud experienced a site outage.

Panopto’s cloud operations team has resolved the issue.

The cause of the incident was a misconfiguration on a database server. During Panopto’s most recent downtime release on Dec 19, they updated the configuration of their database servers to better utilize physical memory. The new configuration contained an error that caused the database server to reach an out of memory condition. Panopto resolved the outage by fixing the misconfiguration on the server that ran out of memory. To prevent a recurrence of this issue, their engineering team audited and updated the memory configuration on all database servers.