I’m hanging with the kids a lot more than expected, this weekend. See, somebody had to go to the hospital tonight and is likely to be there for a couple of days. Therefore, I’m crashing out at the kids’ place.
Hey, this’ll be a great chance for the kids and I to get in some more quality time. That’s always a good thing. Now to see if anyone actually sleeps tonight…
Say you’re a service vendor, and you’re working with a company to set up additional services. This is a company you’ve been dealing with for a while now. Now say that the IT Department at the company in question sets up, for instance, some port-forwarding rules on their firewall. You’re able to connect to the computers you need, and can install the software. Then you come across a problem, and you think it’s firewall-related. Who do you contact?
Apparently, if you’re our streaming audio provider, you don’t contact the IT Department. You send an email to someone else entirely at the company, at 9:30 in the morning, and wait for someone to get things taken care of.
I found out about the email in question at about 3:00 in the afternoon when the guy who received the email asked, “So, did you fix the firewall problem?” (My reply, of course: “Uh, what firewall problem?”)
This gets even better, as it tends to around our offices. It turns out that while the remote-access port was working well enough as I configured it, the vendor decided to change the port that the encoder listens on… to the outside port I gave them to connect to… not the original standard port that I had the firewall forwarding to. If they’d just left things the hell alone, we might very well have been streaming by day’s end. But no, oh no. Clearly they know more about this stuff than I do. Who am I, anyway? I’m just the IT guy, after all.
6pm. This evening. Downtown Portland at Backspace. Of course you’ll be there. Why would you be anywhere else?
Portland Bloggers. Come on down and meet your fellow compulsive journallers.
UPDATE: Why would you be anywhere else? Duh, because everyone else got the memo that tonight was “Really Bad Punk ‘Music’ Over The Sound System Night” at yonder gathering venue. I am not kidding. The worst, ever. No verve, no creativity, lame lyrics, bad singing, no musical chops on the part of any bandmember. I essentially listened to the same bad “song” for a solid half hour. Hey, it’s not like anyone could tell the difference between any two given tracks. I don’t know who picked the music this evening, but they need to be strung up in some exceedingly painful fashion. Be grateful that you missed it, folks.
Thanks to the twinlet for a) alerting me to the fact that I don’t have Radical Bender’s blog linked or in my feedreader and b) alerting me to this post regarding Google Web Accelerator on said blog.
I set up port-forwarding on my proxy/firewall machine. Not only did I manage to make it work in fairly short order, but I also managed to do it correctly the first time.
So, the impetus for this crash (if you’ll pardon the term) course in firewall geekery? The powers that be want KKSN and Charlie streaming, immediately if not sooner. We don’t have enough hard IP addresses to do so. Thanks to a suggestion from Corporate IT, I came up with another solution that I wasn’t sure I could pull off, but still looked like a better idea than ordering another bank of IP addresses from our ISP. (I hate changing DNS for a dozen machines and all sorts of domains. Gah.)
Now if only we could get to a point where, you know, I could work on the normal parts of my job that I’ve had to largely ignore for, oh, quite a few months now…
Dear Apple:
I shouldn’t have to jump through so many damned hoops to reset an iPod, or to properly reinstall your iTunes-and-related software, nor should I be forced to re-disable all of the stupid defaults in Quicktime every time iTunes is (re)installed. It also shouldn’t be so damned difficult to convince iTunes not to start up every time any profile signs into the computer just because an iPod is attached (for the sake of charging).
After hearing all the raves and hoopla about what a great piece of music software iTunes is, and after actually working directly with it, I can only assume that most people don’t expect much from their software besides a shiny-looking interface.
Bah.
(This entry brought to you by one too many times spent wrestling Lil’s iPod and iTunes into submission. Ugh. And I’m the one who recommended the damned thing to her, so I have only myself to blame…)
