The fun and excitement of the Enco situation this week has obscured another interesting technical situation. We ordered some new studio telephone equipment that arrived late last week, and today (at long last) we tried to configure its hub.

Telos’ 2101 “hub” is a computer designed to manage remote phone sets. (This is the machine we thought was blue-screening last week, for those of you who’ve been following along at home.) It’s running Windows NT “Embedded,” which I’ve never seen before.

So we tried to configure it over the network, which is the only way provided to configure one of these machines. After sorting out some subnet issues we were able to ping the box, but not talk to it via the provided configuration utility.

“Oh,” Telos’ tech support says, “You have to authenticate to the box first.” Turns out we have to search for the machine by IP address through Windows networking, connect with username and password, then the configuration utility is allowed to do its job. Hmm. We didn’t see that anywhere in the documentation.

Then things took a turn for the weird. See, it turns out that the provided utility is known for doing weird, bad things to the device it configures. Well, we don’t want that, do we? So we attempt to download updated software via the utility. And we attempt, and we try, and we try, and we attempt, and we try some more. All is for naught, however, and we can’t figure out why. One clue is that the reported software version on the 2101 is more than two years old. It is, in fact, almost the first “released” version of the 2101’s software. This baffles Telos’ tech support guy.

In an attempt to figure out what’s going on (here comes the cool part) I’m instructed to fire up Netmeeting and use it to connect to the 2101… and upon connection I’m given a desktop to control! That’s right, folks. I was looking at an NT desktop via a Netmeeting instance designed to allow last-ditch system administration on a box that lacks keyboard and video display (but does provide the hookups therefore, go figure).

To wrap up, it turns out that the software we were trying to connect to and update wasn’t even running on the computer. Telos is going to prep a new CF card with the most-recent software revision and “all that,” which we should receive next week. Supposedly we can just drop that CF card into place and ship them back the one we have, and then we’ll be able to use the web-based administration and (gasp!) actually have working, running software when we boot the device.

Wow. I’m really glad I didn’t go home immediately after we finished up the Enco project today…