LON-CAPA Help
LON-CAPA will send automatic e-mail to administrators/support staff
under certain circumstances. The contact information data table can
be used to provide e-mail addresses for receipt of these e-mails and
to configure which types of e-mail should be sent to each address.
The types of e-mail are:
- Error reports - whenever a server encounters a 500 error (Internal
Server Error), Apache will handle that event by displaying an error
report form which the affected user can complete and submit. The submission,
which contains session information besides any information provided
by the user, will be sent as an e-mail.
- Package update alerts - the CHECKRPMS script run three times a week
(on Monday, Thursday, and Sunday) will generate e-mail if it detects that
package updates are needed.
- Module integrity alerts and new LON-CAPA releases - a nightly process
compares checksums for LON-CAPA modules installed for your current release
with the expected values for that release retrieved from one of the Academic
Consortium servers (if your server is part of the LON-CAPA network).
An alert is sent if checksums or versions don't match, or if a new LON-CAPA
release has been announced.
- LON-CAPA server status
A nightly run of the /home/httpd/perl/loncron script will generate an e-mail
if the weighted total of notices, warnings, and errors exceeds a specified
threshold. The script checks load average, disk usage, and recent entries
in the log files for the lond and lonc LON-CAPA daemons, as well as the
difference between the number of delayed "critical" transactions and
the number of such transactions subsequently completed when connection
was re-established, (as recorded in the permanent log file:
/home/httpd/perl/logs/lonnet.perm.log). If an e-mail is sent the message body
contains the same HTML as in the /lon-status/ page on each LON-CAPA server,
for which access is configured using the "Display Detailed Report" item
in the domain configuration for "Access to server status pages";
- Alerts for users sharing the same student/employee ID - a script is
run every other night to check for use of the same student/employee ID by
multiple users in your domain. In LON-CAPA, a username must be unique,
and it is also recommended that student/employee IDs are unique.
Definition of the default Admin e-mail address and the default Support
e-mail address saved from the "Contact Information" screen supercede
any definitions made when ./UPDATE is run to update to a new version
of LON-CAPA. Addresses entered the first time ./UPDATE was run on
the primary library server for the domain (i.e., when LON-CAPA was
first installed) will continue to apply until the first "Save"
of the Contact Information settings has occurred in the domain.
Three additional settings allow you to specify:
- Whether error reports submitted by users should be sent to the
core developer group at Michigan State University (as well as to the
recipients selected in your domain).
- Whether an e-mail reporting a completed upgrade to a new LON-CAPA version
should be sent to the core developer group.
- Whether an e-mail containing the nightly status report generated by
loncron should be sent to the core developer group if the total error count
exceeds a specified threshold.
The default is to send all three types of e-mail to the core developer group.
Settings for the nightly status check e-mail are also managed from
the contact information screen.
- Thresholds for error counts can be set. If the total error
count exceeds the relevant threshold then e-mail will be sent. The default thresholds are:
(a) 200 for status e-mail to be sent to designated recipient(s) in the domain,
and (b) 2500 for staus e-mail to be sent to the core developer group.
- Weights used to compute error count can be set. The default weights
are: Errors 100, Warnings 4, and Notices 1. In addition, the default weight for
Unsent 'critical' notifications to other LON-CAPA nodes is 5, but because unsent
items are considered as Warnings, their effective weight is 5 x 4 (i.e., 20).
- Servers with unsent updates to be excluded from count can be set.
An 'update' command will be sent to a LON-CAPA server subscribed to a resource,
on republication of the resource. If the server is uncontactable, the update will
be stored as a delayed transaction, and will contribute to the Unsent total,
unless the server is no longer present in the authoritative hosts table available
from the consortium's name server(s). If a specific server is still listed in the
hosts table and is contributing to the overall error count, because there
are update commands which have yet to be successfully sent, it can be explicitly
excluded from adding to the count.
Configuration of the "Ask helpdesk" web form, and who receives help request
e-mail is also done from the screen used to set contact information.
Helpdesk requests - clicking the Help link displayed at the right
side of the inline navigation bar at the top of a LON-CAPA page (unless
the Remote Control is active) will display a Help Menu which includes
an "Ask helpdesk" link. The "Ask helpdesk" link provides access to
a web form which a user will complete and submit to request LON-CAPA support.
The submission, which contains information about the user's browser,
besides information provided by the user, will be sent as an e-mail.
Help requests submitted via the helpdesk form by a domain's users
can be handled differently from requests submitted by users from
other domains. If a user is from another domain, that domain's
settings for helpdesk e-mail recipient will apply. However, in
the case where a domain has not set that information, or the
domain can not be contacted to retrieve it, then the fall-back is
to use the settings for helpdesk requests for other (unconfigured)
domains. For a domain's users, if institutional user types have been
defined for the domain (see Default authentication/language etc.
(
), then helpdesk settings for e-mail
recipients can be set for the different user types, which will override
the defaults. When a help request is submitted the requester's user type
will determine the recipients of the e-mail. The following can be set for
the two classes of user (own domain, and other domains), as well as for
the domain's user types.
- E-mail recipient(s)
Recipients can include the Admin e-mail address and/or the
Support e-mail address, as well as other addresses. In addition
a Bcc address can be included.
- Optional added text
A text string can automatically be added to each e-mail,
either prepended to the subject, or to the body of the message.
Extra helpdesk form fields
The user's e-mail address, and the message subject and description are
always required fields in the web form. The following are additional
fields which can be set to be one of: optional or not shown.
- Name
- Phone
- Username and domain
- Course Details
- Section
- Cc e-mail
- File upload
In the case of Name and Phone, the fields may also be set to required,
and in the case of CC e-mail and File upload, those are only shown
when the helpdesk web form is accessed by a user logged into LON-CAPA.
If the File upload field is to be displayed, the allowed size of the
upload can be specified (the default is 1.0 MB).