What Happened to CoursePlus on October 12 and 13?
In case you didn't notice (and you probably did), CoursePlus was unavailable for a short while on Monday, October 12 around 1:30pm and Tuesday, October 13 around 10:30am. Each outage lasted about 25 minutes. We recognize that any outage of CoursePlus, particularly during the day, is an inconvenience for many students, faculty, and staff. While we can't guarantee 99.99% uptime of CoursePlus, we do take these outages seriously and want to keep downtime to a minimum.
The reason that there was an outage on both of these days is because there was a misconfigured Google Search Appliance running on the JHU network that was bombarding CoursePlus with hundreds upon hundreds of requests, not stopping to request information from CoursePlus when it should have, endlessly consuming server resources until the server didn't have any more resources to allocate to the Google Search Appliance requests. We've spoken with the administrators of this Google Search Appliance, and they recognize that the appliance was malfunctioning. Our expectation is that they have fixed the operation of their Google Search Appliance, and we should not see this problem again.