Lab Environment Dissappears

gbeauw

I had to stop working on my lab (11.1) in the middle of getting Ceph setup (after quit a bit of work) and get on a conference call.  When I returned to my Lab under Cosine, it just says, "Loading . . ." and nothing I do seems to bring it back.  Where is the "Resume" button???!!!!

Are you timing out Lab Environments???  If so, your Timeout Period should be in the several hours range.  Either that, you need to save the Environment so the student can pick up where they left off after spending 2-3 hours working on the Lab.

serewicz

Hello,

I am unsure of the settings at the moment. I have passed along your post to the infrastrucutre team and hope to hear back the details soon.

Regards,

 

cseepersad

Each lab is decommissioned after 60 minutes of inactivity. Apologies for the inconvenience of the lost work. We'll update the course material to make this much clearer to users.

 

gbeauw

Communicating the timeout interval is good. However, 60 minutes is a bad timeout value!  I realize you don't want to tie up valuable resources but 60 minutes is way too short.

Given the amount of time it takes to execute some of the labs which have to install code (this can take some time as in the case of the Ceph Labs), we must frequently multitask.  Remember, most of us have jobs that often require us to "pause" our Lab Work as in my case to do a conference call.

A more realistic timeout value for Labs is 12-24 hours.  This gives use the opportunity to step away for a bit and then come back to finish our exercise without losing our work.  The other option is to "snapshot" the state of the machines in the lab when you timeout the machines.  You could then send an email with a link to relaunch the Lab from where it was discontinued.  You could release the resources associatted with the snapshot after some period of time (2-3 days?) or whenever the student launches a different Lab.

In any case, 60 minutes is really way too short.

P.S. I shouldn't have to specify a Subject each time I "Reply" to a Thread.  The Thread Subject should stay the same for better Search abilities.Also, I find the "Search" feature on this Forum to be nearly useless.  Maybe I just don't understand how to "search".