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Looking For Quacks In The Pavement

Month: December 2003

  • Of Windows, Phone Equipment And Troubleshooting

    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…

  • Enco Wars

    First thing Tuesday morning, the main Enco digital audio storage server died. After hours of troubleshooting and tinkering, we brought it back online… minus all of its audio data that was lost when one of the drives in its array died. (We’re running RAID 0 because it’s the only way we can get enough capacity out of the array.)

    We switched everybody over to the standby server, and told that server to restore its audio data to the main. No problem, right?

    Wrong.

    Shortly before midnight last night, the standby server decided to hang. We lost ten hours out of our restoration process because the server didn’t crash enough to come to the attention of my server monitor. Argh. (It was reporting X amount of available drive space… on a drive that was no longer responding. *grumble*)

    The plot thickens: An attempt to restart the “rsync” file transfer process revealed another problem. Rsync was starting over from the very first file… even though no differences between the source and destination files could be determined! I’ve come to believe that using rsync across operating systems is a Very Bad Idea. (I’m having a similar problem backing up our main office server. Le sigh.)

    So now I get to manually copy batches of audio data from the standby to the main server. This should only take, oh, another dozen hours or so. Nevermind that the copy command does a slower job than rsync, and nevermind the headache of updating to catch deleted files. I’m probably going to have to perform evil involving something like DirComp from a Windows workstation mapping both servers.

    All of this adds up to no vacation day tomorrow, and I’ll probably be here Saturday and Sunday as well. I’m going to be gone Monday, no matter what: No way am I missing out on Two Towers!

    UPDATE: It’s just about 9pm, and I’m just about to head back to the office. Why? Because the file transfer has stopped again. This graph shows the traffic on the network port through which the file transfer is being done. See that sudden stop right around 5:30? Right about the time I was leaving the building? Yeah, that’s just peachy.

    Near as I can tell (from shelling in to the standby server from home), this time the stoppage isn’t because the RAID controller in the standby server is a piece of crap. (That was the cause of last night’s crash.) I don’t know why it’s stopped, really. I only know that I have to go back down there and start it up again. Le sigh.

    At this rate I really will still be working on this “project” come Saturday. Argh. I love my job, really I do… but sometimes there are parts of my job I could do without.

  • All Hail Sumomo

    Another care package from The Great Wet North arrived today. No brownies this time, but I did get some music CDs and…

    Hey look, it’s a mug, and cocoa to drink from that mug! But wait… whose image is that on the mug? Let’s take a closer look:

    It’s Sumomo! I have a Sumomo mug! Yay!

    Wow. Whoever sent me this must be one heck of a nice person, huh?

  • The Fellowship Is The Thing

    Today was the first of three scheduled movie viewings this month, all of movies that include the words “Lord” and “Rings” in their bipartite titles.

    Ben, John, Constance and I went to the before-noon showing of the extended edition of Fellowship. And when you extend a movie that was already three hours in length, you can expect numb buttocks when you’re through. Still, it’s a damned good movie, and I had damned good company. I miss hanging out with Ben, dammitall.

    This was my first time watching the extended version, and my eighth viewing of the movie itself. I still like it just as much as I ever did, I must say. The added bits were, well, added bits. Some were entire scenes originally cut, while others were extended versions of scenes. Whole scenes include a brief bit between Gandalf and Frodo just before they arrive at the entrance to Moria, and another short sequence in which Aragorn and Boromir spot Gollum trailing behind the Fellowship along the river. And let’s not forget Singing Aragorn. (I like Viggo, yeah, but sadly he just can’t sing.) Gimli has some material restored that balances his use as Comic Relief Dwarf, and that’s a damned good thing.

    As for extended versions of scenes, those were mostly in the fight sequences. We watch Legolas showing off his ability to draw down and shoot nearby targets in rapid succession, towards the end; in the original edit, we see him get off three shots, while in this edit it’s more like six or seven. The cave troll battle is almost twice as long, and this edit answers the question of how the troll ends up with the spear he uses to impale Frodo. Boromir, in the same sequence, gets a fabulous “oh, hell” take as he realizes that being chained to an angry cave troll might be a bad idea.

    Nothing significant about the movie is changed, and only a few of the restored clips feel jarring, forced or out of place. You walk away from the extended version feeling much the way you do about the original: “Okay, I’m ready for the next one… just let me go to the bathroom, stretch my legs, and grab a bite to eat, please.”

    Actually, I need to amend that. One major thing is different: The feel of things at the beginning. In the original edit, there’s a real feel of complete innocence and lightness in the early Shire scenes. Now, however, with the much-revised opening sequences, the ambience is darkened somewhat. It’s a subtle change, but it colors your viewing of the rest of the early part of the movie. I leave it to better minds than mine to determine if this is a good or bad thing… for me, it is merely different.

    Next week? The Two Towers… extended edition. I’m really looking forward to that one, since I’ve only seen Towers a couple of times in the theater and never on DVD…

  • Okay, so nix that “creative energy” notion…

    Remember just a few days ago when I wrote about how “back” I was? I had all of this drive, determination and motivation? Yeah. That went nowhere in a big screaming hurry, didn’t it? It’s sure as hell gone, now.

    I’ve tried no less than three times today to pick up and delve into Blender, the 3D animation studio. I just… can’t… do it. Between times I’ve tried to come up with a good music video idea. Nope, I can’t do that either. How about some writing? A couple of false starts, but nothing to (*cough*) write home about.

    I’m so frustrated I could scream. But that would be a bad idea, don’t you know. There’s enough tension around here right now, who cares about one whiney guy who can’t get his creative juices flowing? It’s not the end of the world, after all.

    Just because I’ve thought of myself my entire life as a creative sort of person, that shouldn’t mean the fact that I’m really not ought to send me into a dark pit of despair, right?

    I guess I’ll go back to playing games. I can do that…

  • Amazonian Correctness

    As has been noted at various locations, your Amazon wish list link may or may not work depending on how the URL is constructed.

    I’m here to state, for the record, that my wish list link is, and always has been, correctly constructed.

    See?

    We now return you to your regularly scheduled holiday shopping season. Thank you.

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