Delays in lecture podcast processing
09 Feb 2018
Over the past few days, we have experienced issues on the network storage service we use for processing our lecture podcasts
Update (Monday 19 February, 3:15pm)
The issue with the storage for the lecture podcast service has now been resolved, and recordings are now again being processed as normal.
Update (Friday 16 February, 11:45am)
After maintenance work, the performance of the lecture podcast service has significantly improved after the issues of the past two weeks. Currently, processing is running as normal, and we will continue to monitor performance of the service over the weekend.
Please bear in mind though; further maintenance is likely to be needed, so we will keep you updated if we need to revert back to processing the podcasts daily.
Many thanks for bearing with us while we carry out this work; be assured we’re treating this at an extremely high priority and will continue to do so until the issue is fixed.
We’ll post a further update by 4pm on Monday 19 February, and you can keep updated on any other developments by following @uomPodcast on Twitter.
Update (Tuesday 13 February, 11.50am)
Work on repairing the lecture podcast storage is progressing as planned. The issue has been identified, and we expect to fully restore the service by the morning of Monday 19 February.
For the rest of this week, lectures will be recorded as normal and we plan to process them daily in the evening. As a result, lectures should be available for download one day after recording, or one day after publishing if the lecturer has chosen to hold the lecture for editing. Staff will be able to manually upload content to the video portal once the service has been fully restored.
We will issue the next update before 12 noon on Friday 16 February.
Follow @uomPodcast on Twitter for information.
Update (Monday 12 February, 9am)
We have been working over the weekend to mitigate the issues with the lecture podcast service. Improvements are being seen, however the following symptoms will continue to occur until the issue is resolved:
Staff
- Staff cannot manually upload content to the video portal;
- Although the editing service is available, any edited podcasts will not be available for download until there is a processing ‘window’. For example, podcasts edited on Saturday will not be available until later on this evening (Monday);
- All lecture podcasts are delayed, but the majority are available for download within 24 hours.
Students
- Students are able to download any existing podcasts, but the processing of podcasts is still currently slower than usual. However, the majority of podcasts are typically available within a 24 hour period.
We continue to work with our storage supplier on fixing the issue, and while there is not yet a known time to fix, we will issue the next update by 12 noon on Tuesday 13 February.
Updates are also being posted on the @uomPodcast Twitter account.
Original message (Friday 9 February, 10:55am)
As a result, we had to take measures to pause processing, which led to a noticeable delay before podcasts were available.
To mitigate the risk of further significant problems on our storage service, we must pause processing again during the working day. This will result in lectures from today (Friday) becoming available later this evening.
Further updates will be posted on the @uomPodcast Twitter account.