fizzle

``Hey,'' you ask, ``didn't the invitation say something about live video broadcasts?''

Oh. That.

Well it almost happened, it really did!

The dish for the wireless T1 was on the roof of the club by around noon, (thanks to the kind folks from Proxim and Hypnovista) and the rest of us showed up at around 2:00pm to finish setting up. The various pieces of hardware we needed trickled in throughout the day, most of which had never been assembled in the same place before. It took some work to get them set up, including calling various people to find the root passwords needed to configure computers and routers. But that was all par for course -- what killed us was that we didn't get IP connectivity until about 5 minutes before 8:00pm, when the doors opened.

Why? Apparently the landlord of the building housing the other end of our wireless IP link had managed to roll over the dish! Such timing! Attempts were made to repair the damage, but the net didn't come online until just before guests were entering the club, and nobody was really in the mood to continue debugging router and software configurations while the party was taking place around them.

Had we gotten IP connectivity earlier in the day, we probably could have worked through all the remaining problems; but having to wait for it cost us too much time. Thus, no MBONE, no IRC.

We couldn't do the RealVideo broadcast for an even more pedestrian reason: though the club had an ISDN line, we could not convince the router (or perhaps some other critical link) to use the dialing code needed to reach RealNetworks in Seattle! Foiled because we couldn't manage to make a long distance call.

We did have a pair of machines networke together for Quake, however. But only a pair. We thought we were going to have four, but the guy who promised to bring the other two flaked out on us, and never showed up, or even called! This was especially unfortunate, as his were the machines with extra NTSC outputs; the two machines we did have only had RGB out, and so we weren't able to display the Quake match on one of the projection screens.

The moral to this story should be obvious: always do a dry-run. Had we assembled all the hardware in the same place the night before, we could have gotten all the software installed and configured and ready to go, and all we would have had to deal with on the day of the event would be cabling and acts of god (or of landlord.)

Next time for sure...

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