Tech Updates

Help!  BAIP Isn’t Working For Me!
While we strive to make sure BAIP works for every user, we do occasionally encounter situations where certain BAIP functions don’t work for individuals, schools, or even entire districts.  Below we’ll describe a recent problem we encountered and how it was solved.  We hope the following account encourages you to report any of your own BAIP problems to us.  If there is ANYTHING that doesn’t seem to be working in BAIP, small or large, contact us and we’ll work with you until we get the issue resolved.

BAIP problems aren’t yours to fix, they’re OURS to fix!

District Tools Not Working
Recently a district contact from one of our member districts emailed us with an issue involving an inability to add their teachers to BAIP.   As we pursued the problem through a series of back and forth emails, the problem grew more mysterious. 

When we logged in as this district contact from our computers in the BAIP main offices, we were able to enroll teachers.  Odder still, when this district contact signed into BAIP from a remote site, they too were able to enroll teachers.  This suggested that there was a problem with their district computers.  Oddly, though, this same user was able to use many other parts of BAIP, including other data submission forms, from the same district computers.  One would expect all BAIP data submission to fail if the problem was merely with the configuration of the district computers.  We were stumped.

Having already moved from emails to one on one phone calls, we decided to schedule a conference call with a variety of personnel from the member district and the main BAIP office to see if we could methodically walk through the problematic process and find out where things were going awry. 

This member district uses KANREN and smartly they invited a KANREN staff member to join the  conference call.  After an hour of packet tracking conversation (“I clicked the button… did your router see the packet?”), we were surprised to find that the enrollment calls were actually getting blocked on the way out of the KANREN network (and not, as is typically the case, on the way into the network). 

We were able to go into the logs and find the exact reason the filters gave for blocking the form submission.  Armed with this knowledge, our own BAIP system administrator was able to quickly identify the code that was triggering the filter block.  This code was quickly modified and voila, the district could now enroll teachers.     

At BAIP, problems like this one remind us that our goal is not to figure out where to lay blame, but to get BAIP working for our customers.  In this case the district computers, the KANREN filters, and our own code were all configured reasonably.  Sometimes these independent configurations don’t mesh smoothly together, and in those cases solutions are found when owners of the various parts work together.

If you encounter any technical problems with BAIP, know that if the solution takes a few minutes or a few conference calls, we’ll work with your district until BAIP works for you.


Thanks!
Thanks for using BAIP and helping us make BAIP better.  Please feel free to contact me with your questions and comments. Have a fantastic day!

Dan Spurgin
BAIP Technical Assistance
spurgin@ku.edu
785-864-1039