We are just over a week into the Django for Everybody Specialization and we have a server outage. This server outage affects all of the autograders which run on a server outside Coursera – (www.dj4e.com). This is *not* a problem with the Coursera servers this is my server.  Coursera servers are doing just great.

The outage may last as long as Sunday 5PM Eastern United States Time.

When I saw the server down today Friday at 5PM, I figured that it was because the crush of students in DJ4E had overrun it with all of their enthusiastic load. And then I realized that it has plenty of performance to spare – but instead it was in a server room where the electric company is re-doing the power into the building this weekend. So it will be a while.

Once the server comes back up – I will move this server to our Amazon hosted systems. These systems are still University of Michigan operated and professionally maintained and care deeply about protecting your private data.

When I taught this material on campus, it was fine to run this course using our on-campus resources, but before we released this as a world-wide MOOC – I should have moved the server from UM on campus resources to UM Amazon resources. Once the server comes back up I can do that move in less than an hour and with no loss of data. I won’t do that right away – when it comes back up – I will just leave it alone for a bit and then migrate to a new server room after things settle down.

So I apologize personally for this outage and will make sure to keep such an outage from happening in the future and once this comes back up we can all get back to learning Django.

While you are waiting, you can binge-watch all of my office hours or my car racing playlist on YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlRFEj9H3Oj6VbnK4nrBt5p803kXnf6VT

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlRFEj9H3Oj4qyq0OLZ76cMtUUgqUNtmz

Thanks for being part of the first week of Django for Everybody.