SWAN is happy to announce that the daily "maintenance hours" have been reduced to" maintenance minutes"! In addition these minutes take place during the early morning hours, saving your patron from inconvenience.
The new SWAN servers are running fantastic. The power behind staff reports is really evident and the processing power is dealing with our peak times. The new servers are utilizing virtualized technologies which will allow SWAN to deal with the 10pm maintenance window affecting patrons using the catalog from home. We will provide library directors an update on this April 9th if not sooner.
E-Commerce Internet Explorer 9 Browser Problems: Fix Underway
We have a fix in the works for this problem. Patrons using Internet Explorer 9 cannot always access all of the fields to complete an e-commerce transaction. For example name, credit card number, etc. This does not happen in Firefox and was not a problem prior to the server migration. Once we have a fix we will notify you via SWANcom.
Reciprocal Activity Report, Monthly Report Not Working: Fix Underway
The monthly report "Your Patrons' Circ Activity" generated by SWAN is not working since the server migration. This report would be uploaded for member libraries each month. SWAN staff have not been able to run this report since we migrated to the new servers. Innovative reported that software engineers have created a fix and it is currently in quality & assurance testing. Once we have a fix we will notify you via SWANcom.
Below is our most current list of issues SWAN libraries are experiencing since the February 26 server migration.
Millennium Bib & Item Retrieval is Slow: Software Patch Scheduled
The software patch will be installed the morning of Tuesday March 19th. This patch requires all Millennium clients to be updated with the latest client. This is detailed in the memo below.
The indexing parameters on the new server resulted in a 5-8 minute wait before a newly added bib record can be retrieved in a keyword search by library staff. We have adjusted the timing to 3 minutes and will adjusted this to a smaller 1 minute timing after we are satisfied there is no impact.
Link Maintenance: Not Working
The scheduled process "link maintenance" has not been running since February 26th. The symptoms of this will be item records added will not appear in location order in the summary. We are waiting on this to be fixed.
To reassure everyone, the new server arrangement is powerful, efficient, and designed for high load and fault tolerance. The specifications were approved by Innovative and in the words used by the Innovative's Vice President of Product Technology "these are well-provisioned servers." The issues we have encountered are after the migration are "application layer" in nature which means that it's the Millennium system requiring adjustment. We knew that some tweaking would be needed post-migration. What we didn't know would hit us was a hardware crash just hours after we completed the Tuesday migration. We also had a very frustrating day Thursday where libraries were barely circulating.
What Happened Thursday?
There was a standard debugging parameter that Innovative support turned on Wednesday around 7pm as part of our post-migration investigation. This diagnostic software is used by Innovative frequently with its customers when it's investigating Millennium client-server communication. Unfortunately for SWAN it had an adverse effect on SWAN MilCirc functions, causing the 500+ Millennium client sessions to consume massive amounts of the server processing power.
From 9am – 3pm SWAN was contending with 100% CPU utilization, whereas the prior the maximum had been 13% CPU under full load of libraries circulating. Once Innovative realized the diagnostic tool was causing the issue they turned it off and we requested libraries restart their Millennium clients and the problem went away.
Below are the survey results of your library's staff participation in our ILS survey. Survey closed at Wednesday February 20th at 5:00pm. The memo is posted in the SWAN Member's Only section here (L2 login and password required).
All member libraries will be impacted by this server upgrade. Please circulate the attached memo and mark the evening of Monday February 25th starting at 7pm and morning of Tuesday February 26th as downtime for this server upgrade.
This upgrade will occur overnight with scheduled Innovative staff working from California. We here at SWAN abhor downtime as much as you do but the upgrade will require libraries to use Offline Circulation during the time period the memo specifies.
Library staff should take a look around the new SWAN support website. Over the last few months we have been busy moving documents from the old MLS website into this new Drupal based site.
