Snow Days are Coming - will SWGfL cope ??? !!

[FragglePete]

SMT are running around like headless chickens at the moment ensuring we have a plan for potential snow days. I've been primed to expect a phone call early on so I can update our Facebook, Twitter and School Website followed by sending out messages via ParentMail. Students have been informed that they must access the Frog VLE during any school closure where each department has a snow day folder setup with work they MUST do.

As fellow SWGfL users will know, snow days of previous years have led to a complete failure of parents being able to access hosted school websites, along with not be able to reach servers inside our network from the outside world. Each year promises of upgrades will ensure that connectivity are made but still it's failed. No snow days last year, so a year of grace and I know more upgrades have been done, so, SWGfL.... are you ready?

Pete

[rad]

So Twitter, LGFL, School website (that will crash) and the school phone system (no one listens to)

I think Twitter and Facebook are the only mediums that will hold up. The rest will fall flat on their faces IF we have 10ft of snow (This is my view and not of the view of the school, borough or country I live in)

[plexer]

Sorry miss I don't have internet at home, it wasn't working etc.... so couldn't access the vle.

Ben

[Oaktech]

It will indeed be interesting. We host ourselves, in fact the webserver is currently warming my knees, but the redirects are at SWGfL, so who knows.

[Boredguy]

Thankfully, the only load we're expecting is students logging into HAP to access any files. Anything else is via the externally hosted VLE.

Touch wood, we've not experianced any issues accessing our sites & resources via the SWGfL in previous snow days. In fact the last one we had lots of staff connected in via VPN during the day writing their SIMS reports, and I fully expect that to occur again on Friday if the white stuff somehow manages to fall and prevent buses getting into our rural location.

[TheScarfedOne]

Ours is holding up ok too, internal hosting with the grid redirects. So long as Devon DNS doesn't go walkabout again like yesterday.... We will be fine

Groupcall primed and ready for the message

[FragglePete]

Oh look - just tried to do an update to the site this morning to say we're open, and I can't get access due to demand.

Pathetic! SMT no doubt will give me a hard time and will now have to look at alternatives.

Pete

[witch]

Neither of my schools could update their websites today. Bless SWGfL

[FragglePete]

And we've just had to close. I've had to put up a temporary .html file with just the basic information and any SQL driven site just can't cope!

Pete

[stevehill06]

sounds about right for SWGfL..

[Willott]

If it's anything like the rubbish setups of other RBCs, it'll be a webserver with DB on it, so as soon as SQL load increases, PHP fails due to SQL queries failing - they still haven't worked out to split the DB load off to some high spec servers (ie 64GB RAM, SSDs) and have web servers being just that... web servers.

[FragglePete]

From what I understand, the SQL Servers are now separated from the Web Servers anyway (my joomla config file certainly reflects this). It was one of the upgrades they did about a year ago in response to past Snow Day failures. Main website does appear to up and running again now so I've put that back online and updated. Frustrating, but ParentMail, Facebook, etc did the trick. Rethink required me thinks.

Pete

[Boredguy]

Uploaded a message to our site around 6.30 this morning, and again at 10 without any issue.
Wonder if it's because we're still using the original basic hosting and just using ASP and a crummy access database backend.

Ah well, new website due at the end of term and no-one has asked me about the hosting implications yet... fun

[witch]

Something else wrong as well - cannot remote into server at either school and cannot get to VLE either

[Edu-IT]

All our website DNS is now over at PointHQ, can't recommend it enough. One less thing to go wrong.

https://www.pointhq.com/

I need to set up some monitoring on our website. As it's externally hosted, never really know if it's up or down.