NC State’s Office of Information Technology (OIT) is scheduled to perform system maintenance Saturday and Sunday, which will affect some campus services including Shibboleth and MyPack Portal. It is one of multiple maintenances scheduled to occur during various weekends this academic year.
Marc Hoit, vice chancellor of information technology and chief information officer, described the process of maintenance.
“We do changes nightly, in the middle of the night,” Hoit said. “But some of the things just require something more substantial; they’re all interconnected. It’s kind of tough on my folks because they’re there from 6 p.m. on a Friday to 4 p.m. on a Sunday, in and out, maybe getting some sleep, trying to do all these big changes.”
Hoit also described why the updates will require a full weekend to complete.
“What happens is, four times a year, we have to do changes, and we have to shut things down,” Hoit said. “It’s unfortunate because we like to keep things going, but things like you’ve got to fix the database, you’ve got to patch them and when you take down the databases, everything stops working because it needs the data.”
Although everything must stop working for the database to be repaired, OIT is rewiring some of the data so that most outlets are still accessible by and available to students and faculty.
“The good news is we have two data centers and what we do is we leave everything running as much as we can in one of them,” Hoit said. “The big one that people get concerned about is our login, you know how when you go to login to certain things it’s the Shibboleth, everything from library access to Moodle to all the different things on campus. So, we have two sets of those, one in each data center, we keep one of them up at all times. If one of them goes down, we shut things down and swap them, so for the most part, most of the things that people need to get access to will be up most of the time.”
The only major outlet expected to be down to students this weekend is MyPack Portal.
“If you want to get to MyPack Portal, that’s going to be down, so if you thought you were going to register for classes this weekend, that’s not going to happen because it will be shut down, but we always do it during a nonregistration time,” Hoit said.
Despite this, some students do not seem to be overly concerned with the lack of access to MyPack Portal.
“Given the time of year, I’m not too concerned because MyPack is nice to have all year round, but it’s not a time of year where I need to access it pretty regularly,” said Charles Roach, a second-year studying computer science. “If there is any bugs in the rollout, I’m sure they will get fixed before I really need it.”
Ultimately, OIT is processing these massive updates to make sure everything is running more smoothly and so that the system is protected. Campus security and efficiency are the number one priorities for OIT, according to Hoit.
“You read about cyber security and all the hacks and all the things that are going on, there is a 30-day patch window that we adhere to for everything that keeps your credit cards and your social security numbers and all that stuff secure,” Hoit said. “We have 30 days to patch it. We get patches built up from the MyPack Portal and from Moodle, and we try and do them overnight and between times.”
Roach also added that he believes security should be a primary focus for OIT.
“I definitely think that MyPack and all the information on it is definitely something that needs to be as secure as possible, so any steps they take to make it more secure is something that I am in support of,” Roach said.
While the OIT has taken steps to make sure these weekends updates are as minimally invasive to the productivity of students and faculty as possible, there is going to be a very brief period where the systems will be down during transfer, and in which, certain outlets will not be available to students and faculty.
“There may be a five-minute window when we are switching from one data center to the other that you can’t get in, so if you just come back five minutes later you’ll be able to get into things like WolfWare,” Hoit said.
