Update: Xtender Maintenance is complete.

Xtender will be unavailable for approximately 30 minutes sometime between 5am-7am on Thursday September 5 while it undergoes routine maintenance. If you have difficulty with Xtender after this post has been updated to indicate the maintenance is complete, please email helpdesk@denison.edu or call (740)587-6395. Please leave a message if earlier than 8 am.

Update: the Cognos upgrade will not be happening tomorrow, September 5th, as we’d originally planned. We will reschedule the work for a maintenance window soon.

Cognos will be unavailable from 5am-7am on Thursday September 5 while it is upgraded from from 10.1 to 10.2.1.  No changes should be made to reports or queries after 5pm on Wednesday, September 5.  If you have difficulty with Cognos after this post has been updated to indicate the upgrade is complete, please email helpdesk@denison.edu or call (740)587-6395.  Please leave a message if earlier than 8 am.

 

Update:  As of 00:30 on 9/3, our provider has put in a work-around to address this issue while troubleshooting continues. Service speeds should be normal again.

Original Post:

Denison’s Internet provider, Oarnet, is experiencing difficulties which has resulted in extremely slow connection time for some of our services, including Blackboard.

What is BitTorrent?

A peer-to-peer protocol commonly used in the practice of sharing copyrighted music, video, and other files across the Internet.

What has changed?

BitTorrent network traffic is no longer permitted through Denison’s Internet firewall.

Why?

Denison regularly receives cease-and-desist notices from agencies representing DMCA, RIAA, MPAA, Sony, HBO and others. During the last academic year, there were 138 notices processed. During the 2011-2012 academic year, there were 280 notices processed.

The administrative effort required to process notifications and to curtail student behavior related to illegal file sharing costs Denison an estimated 250 personnel hours last year.  Additionally, BitTorrent is one of the top 5 Internet bandwidth consumers on the campus network. This contributes to slower overall network performance.

Getting Help

For more information regarding Denison’s policy on peer-to-peer file sharing activities and to access an impressive list of legal sources of online content, see http://denison.edu/forms/its-peer-to-peer-p2p-sharing-policy-guide.

We have been experiencing slowness with our Blackboard learning management system over the past few days.  We are working with the site that hosts our Blackboard instance to resolve this problem.  We apologize for the inconvenience this is causing you.