Check on our Blackboard Learn license and address any issues #1668
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ajpeddakotla
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operations
Tech debt
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I took care of payment + membership renewal; next step is to get our Bb instance back up and running. I have forwarded the following to our eng email list [you can search your email for the terms in bold to find the subject lines]:
I was supposed to receive an email with login credentials for their support portal, Behind the Blackboard, but I think they may have gone to someone else at our org (@ajpeddakotla, when you get a chance, could you check whether they were sent to you?) |
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I am starting to take a look at this. It is a new product on me, so please bear with me whilst I read through docs and review requirements. Updates to follow... |
lyzadanger
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I have taken a look at their documentation and some key points relating to running their developer instances... Using the Blackboard Learn AMI for REST and LTI Development You will need to subscribe to a new AMI release prior to license expiration if you wish to migrate data from the old EC2 to the new. Licenses on AMIs are not extendible. This basically means we are going to need to perform regular maintenance in order to have a developer instance permanently available. We can automate building a new instance once every 3 - 4 months so that is no real pain. However, I suspect we are going to need to get smart with the data we choose to host. Based on what I am reading, I am not sure we will be able to automate the export / import process. It seems to be a limitation of the application, but once I have a new instance built I will take a deeper look. We might be able to directly manipulate the database, but their tools talk about completing the process via their web interface. Currently working my way through our AWS setup and the best way to deploy. Further updates to follow. |
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I have created a new blackboard instance that can be accessed here: https://blackboard.hy-servers.net As it stands, this is a default installation with no data. I have configured a user for admin purposes, so please contact me for details. Unfortunately, I have not been able to obtain access to the old instance in order to perform a data extraction... This is something I am still working on and I hope to be able to to populate it with the data set previously deployed. I will provide further information as I progress. |
Hi @klemay, I just wanted to make sure I am understand correctly. The developer license that has been purchased. Is this something above and beyond what we had before? Just trying to work out if we are going to need to rebuild the environment in a few months if we have the new developer license in place. Thanks, Ian |
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Hi @indigobravo - the developer license is meant to replace the expired one we had before, and expires in 2021. I imagine won't have to rebuild every few months, but possibly on a yearly basis as we renew our license. You might check with Blackboard's Developer Network to confirm though - perhaps something went awry when our instance was set up last time, and we're supposed to be able to swap out the license without rebuilding? |
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Thanks for the info @klemay. I have been doing some research, and I think I know where we have been going wrong. I have a couple of requests:
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I forwarded the BbDN welcome kit email - I never received the email giving
me access to Behind the Blackboard - let’s ask the team about that one in
today’s dev sync!
On Fri, Jun 26, 2020 at 9:34 AM indigobravo ***@***.***> wrote:
Thanks for the info @klemay <https://github.com/klemay>. I have been
doing some research, and I think I know where we have been going wrong.
I have a couple of requests:
- Can you please forward the email containing the BbDN Partner Welcome
kit to: ***@***.*** I have searched my email and I can not
find it.
- Did you ever receive the email with access to behind the blackboard?
—
You are receiving this because you were mentioned.
Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub
<#1668 (comment)>,
or unsubscribe
<https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AC4HDGPQH6NQXQNZU56QJV3RYSPXBANCNFSM4MMXRM6A>
.
--
Katelyn Lemay (pronouns: she/her <https://www.mypronouns.org/she-her>)
Product Manager, Hypothesis <https://web.hypothes.is/>
*Black Lives Matter <https://blacklivesmatters.carrd.co/>. *
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A few updates... 1, I have access to Behind the Blackboard, and opened a ticket to review our options moving forward. I am hoping we can either use their cloud service, or deploy a licensed instance within our own AWS environment. More to come on this when I hear back from them. 2, I have taken a look at the process to extract data from the pre-packaged AMI we are currently using. It is painful, with many manual steps that we are not going to be able to automate, unless we want to invest a serious amount of time. 3, I have taken backups of the following items and upload them to a bucket in S3.
S3 bucket can be found here: Blackboard It should be noted, that these are point in time backups. When we add more content we will need to create new backups. 4, The instance we are currently using expires on: 2020-10-15. This means we need to come up with a permanent solution before mid October, or be prepared to go through the export / import process again.
5, I would like to test the import process on a new instance. This will confirm we have the process correct and we are not missing data. I am not going to perform this operation yet because the instance is not fully configured. I will raise this point during the sync meeting later. That's all for now... |
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Blackboard have responded to the questions I asked. In a nutshell, we are stuck using the Blackboard Developer AMI provided via Amazon Market Place. Their offering of shared SaaS sites is not going to fit our requirements. They appear to be a solution for previewing new blackboard functionality.
As development partners, we do have the licenses to run instances on-prem. However, they only support commercial operating systems and databases. The licensing cost for these is going to be prohibitive.
Another option is for Blackboard to run a hosted service for us, but again, I can see the costs being prohibitive. I can go through the process of obtaining detailed costing for the above, but it is going to be lots. Where does that leave us... The Amazon AMI provided by Blackboard expires after 4 months. There is no option to extend by adding our developer licenses. To solve the problem, I would like to schedule maintenance once every 3 months to ensure we have Blackboard available for both software testing and client demonstrations. This maintenance process will take approximately 1 day of operations time every 3 months. Next steps...
I estimate 1 - 2 days to complete the operations tasks listed above. I hope this makes sense. @klemay / @ajpeddakotla - It would be good to hear your feedback? We have until mid October before the current instance expires so we will need to put something in place before then. |
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Old issue. Closing. We no longer operate our own self-hosted blackboard instance. |
Problem:
Last December, we ran into an issue where our Blackboard LEARN instance stopped working. At that time, David determined that the BB LEARN machine images comes loaded with a license file which expires approximately every 4 months. To address this the last time, David had to spin up a new server instance and migrate all the config and data to the new instance.
I found this document that David created which covers steps for the LEARN data and config transfer: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1mQyL9ozNbjSFKoQ0wC0YZ8f2O3PHP3mh/edit
What's Needed:
Relevant Slack History:
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