AGSB Website Concerns and Solutions (Memo No. AGSB-OD-2324-036)

21 May 2024 
Memo No. AGSB-OD-2324-036

We’ve been receiving more frequent reports of the AGSB website being unavailable. This memo outlines why that is happening and what we are doing to solve this. I will lay out the solution in two time frames: immediate and developmental.

The immediate solution requires all of us, as users, to participate by taking certain actions, which I list below.

Why this is happening

Our website keeps crashing because the technology it relies on is old. The server is a physical piece of hardware that resides in the Rockwell campus, in contrast to the new types of servers that are cloud-based and thus more robust and scalable. The software is also old.

To deal with this, we have been in the midst of migrating to new hardware and software, but the spike in demand from all users has overtaken our initial timeline and we now have to accelerate it.

What we are doing as an immediate, stop-gap measure

The website software is now on automatic refresh every 12 hours, to free up its resources frequently. Think of it as restarting your computer. The DITS team supporting us will be monitoring it more frequently to check its health. They are prepared to make the refresh even more frequent if needed.

What you need to do as a user:

• It takes 30 seconds for the website to restart, so if you catch the website while it’s on the restart cycle, just try again within 30 seconds.
• If the website is still down, you can try an alternate web address: 
  www.ateneo.edu/gsb/portal
• This address will lead you to a set of links – faculty portal for grading, student portal for registration and applications, etc.

What we are doing to develop a more permanent solution

The permanent solution is to complete the migration of the AGSB website to the cloud. We have requested to be moved to the head of the queue, and this has been granted. The time frame for completing this, we have been promised, is a month. Hopefully, by then we will have full service of a more robust and scalable website.

Thank you all for bearing with us during this migration and for participating in the solution.