[LON-CAPA-admin] Not Open To Be Viewed Troubles

[Bynum, Lee Hamilton]

I'm going to set up some additional monitoring on one of the courses that is causing trouble.  I'm also going to look into some of the user files because the labs in question also base resource availability on the state of prelab problem answers.  It is possible the student's answers aren't being recorded properly on the access server as well.

Thank you for the quick responses, Stuart and Mark.  Hopefully I'll find the smoking gun this time around.

Lee

________________________________________
From: lon-capa-admin-bounces at mail.lon-capa.org [lon-capa-admin-bounces at mail.lon-capa.org] on behalf of Stuart Raeburn [raeburn at msu.edu]
Sent: Tuesday, October 03, 2017 7:14 PM
To: lon-capa-admin at mail.lon-capa.org
Subject: Re: [LON-CAPA-admin] Not Open To Be Viewed Troubles

Hello Lee,

There is no log file of access server parameter file changes, but you
could make your own (see below).

Looking back through the archives, it seems you ran into this issue in March.

I posted a response to the list to that earlier post. See:

mail.lon-capa.org/pipermail/lon-capa-admin/2017-March/003273.html

which discussed how to view cached parameters in memcache.

Assuming the open date parameter in effect is for all students, or for
a specific section, and not for individual student(s), then parameters
will be retrieved using lonnet::get_courseresdata(). That will, in
turn, call &lonnet::dump(), when the cache on the access server has
expired (it's valid for 10 minutes).

You could modify lonnet::get_courseresdata() to write the hash
returned by dump() for a particular course to a file (e.g.,
/home/httpd/perl/tmp/debug/$coursenum on the access server).

Your code could check if the file already exists, and if it did move
the existing file to /home/httpd/perl/tmp/debug/$coursenum.old, before
writing the latest data to a new file.

You could then create a perl script, which would be run by cron every
5 minutes to look in /home/httpd/perl/tmp/debug/.  The script would
compare the contents of $coursenum.old and $coursenum (if both exist)
and record what had changed for course: $coursenum for the current
timestamp, in a log file.  The script would then unlink $coursenum.old.


Stuart Raeburn
LON-CAPA Academic Consortium


> Hello Admins,
>
> I am diving back into an issue we've had in which resources are
> temporarily "Not open to be viewed."  The resources should be
> available now and do become available after 10-20 minutes or a
change
> of access server.  The leading theory is that the parameter file is
> being read incorrectly, resulting in the access server thinking the
> resource is unavailable until the bad parameter is updated.
>
> Is there a log anywhere of access server parameter file changes?
> Because things seem to go back to normal after a while I have yet to

> have the problem reported to me in time to look at the potentially
> problematic files in real time.
>
> Sorry for rehashing old troubles, but I'm hoping this time will to
the trick.
>
> Lee

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