BOFH: Videoconferencing for special dummies BOFH logo telephone with devil's horns I think I'm losing my will to live. I'm working on documenting a new videoconferencing unit we've installed in a "state-of-the-art" mini conference room. I use quotes, not because the videoconferencing unit doesn't have some superb features, but because those features will never get used …
All the Simons are entagled and work in unison to present the positive and pleasant environment we all know of the Simons.
All the anti-Simons are random phenomenon and actively steer in different directions where the many anti-Simon collisions cause the remnants to end up in elevator shafts, open windows, no-exit cellars and other convenient types of dark-rooms and -places.
We had to install tamperproof USB and network cables because they were rountinely removed and incorrectly installed (probably attempted to connect USB cables to ethernet ports…, or worse). And, yes, if a cable can be laid in a way that someone can trip over it, it will.
But the worst thing was installing some Microsoft Surface hubs…, apart from the cost – a company car – they're absolute pigs to work with! I think we had to setup a subdomain so that the screens could go online or do screen-sharing and we're not a W365 company. The accounts like to reset themselves every few weeks!
Oh, we also had an auth failure on the company wifi with the machines blithely ignoring the expired certificates even though they had been replaced weeks before with new ones… so now we're preparing some backup switches just in case (the new certs don't expire before 2040…) and I'm not sure whether I should allow the idiots coloured crayon kids connect the cables themselves or use tamperproof, which would mean unsightly but inviting cables on the tables… If it's not one thing then it's another.
Sometimes I miss the simpler and more eleganter equipment of yesterday, where it did not had a plethora of functions, but it just worked, even though the sound and video was of potato quality.
And you didn't had any certificates that needed renewal or upgrading... or a monthly cost (like O365...)
When I was at school then the major risk was from the board rubber* being hurled at one's forehead from the Latin teacher. Back in the 1970's they preferred to use the "Short, Sharp Shock" treatment. Didn't do us any harm ... < twitch >
* a substantial wooden block with a felt insert that was used to clean the chalkboards (as they weren't called back then)
Most languages can provide productive employment for those with degrees in them. Latin is the exception. The only Latin-related employment is teaching or being Prime Minister irrespective of whether the graduate has any talent for it. That's why we have so many dreadful Latin teachers and Latin-oriented PMs.
board rubber - I recall these were called (black)board dusters in our parts (Australasia) at least during the 1960-70s and were also used to reinforce pupil attention and discipline with great precision (or do I mean accuracy?)
Some teachers were specialists in high velocity chalk others the slightly slower dusty (shock and awe :)
In army marksmanship training, I was taught the difference between precision and accuracy.
Precision is five holes in the target, each an eighth of an inch apart but the group 6 inches from the bullseye.
Accuracy is five holes in the target, centered around the bullseye but 6 inches from each other.
We were to strive for both precision AND accuracy!
At my long-closed school in Deal, Kent, we had a particular idiot for a geography teacher, whose only really memorable trait was an obsession with Peterborough United FC, and a habit of throwing board rubbers at people. That ended on the day that he threw one at the sporty kid who was fast enough to duck AND lift up the lid of his desk such that the board rubber ricocheted off it on a gently rising trajectory, exited the room through the (closed, single glazed window, this was the 1970s) & still had enough energy to break the windscreen of the head master's car which was parked directly outside. (Toughened 'screen, not laminated, still the 1970s. Citroën GS from memory, for those that like such details.)
Same thing at my school on Mersea Island. Mr Stuart was famous for his temper. We regularly had to hide behind our desk lids. At the end of the last year, Pink Floyd's Brick in The Wall was in the charts and as we were leaving for the last time we all started chanting at him 'You're just another brick in the wall' The look on his face, knowing there was nothing he could do to stop us.
Happy memories
something something scented markers. :D
and technically, I've used whiteboard markers to get rid of marks made with a 'Sharpie' permanent marker- apparently, the chemicals in the dry-erase markers will lift up and remove the ink from the sharpie markers.
(I also have a bottle of 91% isopropyl used for cleaning things to clean the whiteboards- it's more or less the same stuff as the cleaning fluid and loads cheaper.)
Haven't used a Surface Hub but MTRs suck.
We have 1 Crestron MTR which is okayish when it decides to work.
When it doesn't the troubleshooting is limited to rebooting. This takes 15-20 minutes to reboot, not good in a Lecture Theatre room of people.
At least Cisco works.
Cabling...
.... bane of my life.
The number of times we've been called to rooms because someone has played with the cable is ridiculous. Despite labelling everything, they still play.
Sometimes it is a quick fix but having to spend hours redoing the cabling is annoying.
One room, I have made the cables very difficult to remove.
IT always get the blame despite not being in the room for months.
The number of times we've been called to rooms because someone has played with the cable is ridiculous
And not just USB and HDMI - one of our rooms has a nice audio desk with quite a lot of cables plugged in, but only a few things in use at any one time. I went in there the other day to swap some cables back - because someone had owned up to swapping them when I wasn't there - to find that six or seven other cables were in totally the wrong holes; cables from the radio microphone receivers plugged into the insert points instead of line in, cables from the CD player plugged into auxiliary outputs, the cable which was supposed to be in the aux-out plugged into a different aux-return. Loads of little things.
I find this sort of thing is down to one of two causes. Either the person using the room is so impatient that they can't be bothered to call for technical help when something doesn't work first time, struggle through their meeting (or whatever) with the laptop camera instead of the nice Logitech Meetup camera and then moan to us afterward, or they're the sort of person who likes to think they "know stuff" and cannot admit when they get it wrong.
I'm pretty certain it was the latter case with the audio mixer and I have two prime suspects, but neither of them is going to admit anything.
Oh, and the number of times I've gone into a room and found (for example) two kettles plugged into a single 4-way strip; even the one I've put extremely sticky gaffa over three of the sockets.*
On the other hand we have managed to train one or two people. Upside is that they don't (often) just mess about. Downside is that we have to be there for the start of every one of their meetings because despite having done the same thing every month for the last three years, "it's better for you to do it, that way I know it will work".
M.
*yes, I do have some extensions with just single sockets on the end but someone will always be able to find another 4-way to plug into my extension. And don't lecture me about never plugging kettles into extension leads. I know my stuff and if you saw how stupidly sockets were arranged in our rooms (well, the whole building really), you'd understand. Without an extension lead, in one room you'd have to put an urn on a table more-or-less in the middle of the room, plugged into a floor socket. Yes, I have seen that done, with no barrier around the table and toddlers haring about while their mums chat...
Indeed; I have, sitting and awaiting for me to get the appropriate plugs for, two nice 6 foot length of 12 gauge, 3 conductor cable- they have ten amp connectors on them now, but I need the 20 amp connectors, because I occasionally need short (read: two or three foot) extensions, and those are surprisingly expensive to buy pre-made.
Look for the guitar player among the staff and you've got your suspect. We can't help swapping cables in audio mixers. Not even in those that are perfectly in order or even in those we've set up ourselves. And then there's the curse of the gaffer tape. It gets limp and immediately loses it's stickiness as soon as it sees one of us...
yes, something isn't working fast enough and they start pulling cables and plugging them in randomly. Conference room had monitors that used rs232 at 115200 b/s. had to wait after turning the system on for everything to get the message and acknowledge it. could take several seconds, but people had a habit of repeatedly hitting the on button followed by the off button (just in case) and then the button the selected the input, vga/hdmi front of room, rear of room etc. Lucky if anything worked after all that. usually when i got called to fix things it just took touching the on button and waiting for things to settle, if the cables hadn't been moved in the mean time.
Without an extension lead, in one room you'd have to put an urn on a table more-or-less in the middle of the room, plugged into a floor socket. Yes, I have seen that done, with no barrier around the table and toddlers haring about while their mums chat...
Triva: the only person killed in recent times by an earthquake in Britain was a child who was hiding under a table, and crawled out from under it just as the tea urn that was sitting on it fell off...
You think that is bad in meeting rooms, try the cabling in retail stores, I used to work for Thomas Cook and the number of times a branch stopped working and when we sent an engineer out the wan link would b in the console port or similar. We never found out who was telling them to move cables (we made sure it wasn’t the service desk) and used to blame it on cable fairies who crept around the stores at night.
I think we had at least one or two stores a week suffering the same sort of problems.
We have a lot of projectors which need to start and stop automatically. All the "pro" ones use PJLink and in my experience (there are over 30) it "just works". All the "small business" ones also have PJLink (because I can't buy a projector without) but they mostly also have Crestron Connected. Their inbuilt web interfaces are slow and clunky and their PJLink implementations must be slightly out of whack because my PJ utility (which admittedly was pretty poorly written by me) keeps moaning of "unexpected response from projector" even though startup and shutdown seems to work well.
First met Crestron at Magna back in 2001. Touch panels in each control room, timers which kept losing time and the only way to get changes made was to call the consultants back. Morning startup was tedious.
M.
>auth failure on the company wifi with the machines blithely ignoring the expired certificates even though they had been replaced weeks before with new ones…
Erm, but shouldnt the machines ignore the expired certificates, because they been replaced? Or are the expired certs still on the equipment / end-user devcies and actually require replacing?
>so now we're preparing some backup switches just in case (the new certs don't expire before 2040…).
2040? That may just cause issues in itself when a client decides that the certificate end date is beyond 14months so must be invalid... or a security risk.
" I'm not sure whether I should allow the idiots coloured crayon kids connect the cables themselves or use tamperproof"
We had to put easels with flipcharts on them in the VC rooms because using the VC as a whiteboard was "too complicated" for the coloured pencil brigade. And yes, I have seen them trying to write/draw on the flipchart under instruction from a remote participant because neither end could figure out the shared on-screen whiteboard app :-)
Surface hubs aren't purchased they are summoned by management with a ritual blood sacrifice. We have several and they were so counter intuitive to setup, failed so frequently and their use case was so limited they are now operating as super expensive touchscreen monitors + cameras with a proper SOE computer doing the work....
Every video conference in which I've ever participated, the first 40 minutes were consumed by "technical difficulties," followed by "you just dropped out, I can see you but can't hear you. . . uh, now I can hear you but you've been replaced by a test pattern, what happened to Anna? Did she leave? Bweeeeeeeee echo echo echo screeeeeeeee! Someone's feeding back, turn down your speaker! Okay, time's up, let's meet again next Thursday."
I've said it before... He's the wind... he's everywhere! And this conference room story proves it without a doubt. A place I worked had the coveted conference room for visiting bigwigs, who never had their own dongles, and dollars to doughnuts, they left with ours. It was so hit and miss, someone had to be on hand to make sure it started as expected.
I gave a presentation at a local university some years ago. I was mistaken in thinking that they must have resolved any 'connection issues' for their multiple screens in the lecture theatre.....
In the end I did the presentation from my own laptop connected directly to a projector.
Dave K:
Please don't mention that horrific device again. I gagged a bit.
Even our networking team despised the creatures, and they were the one's who'd suggested them.
I have memories of cfnroenec sllac where sklof at the remote dne appeared to eb gnipmuj up and down in their staes.
That's because it always brings new features. None of which will ever be used, but all the extra buttons for them on the unit will have new and incomprehensible icons on them - what does a square balanced on a circle with a wavy line inside it do?
At least they seem to have moved on to HDMI these days. No more trying to wrestle the thick SVGA cable through a tiny gap between two desks that was tangled up with the cable nest below and then struggle to get it to move the final 2 centimetres needed to connect to your laptop.
Yes, also for loosening too tight screws.
Sometimes you have to keep it simple, also to give the relevant user a hint of possible consequences if he, she or it repeats the offence.
:)
And the fact that with VGA you could use almost any length of cable, daisy-chained if you liked, and you might get a slightly wonky or grainy picture but at least it would work - or would work if you lowered the resolution a notch. With HDMI you're into using boosted cables or inline amplifiers if you need anything longer than about 10m to be safe, 15m absolute tops. Then again, at least those are more reasonable in price these days. When I first needed a 40m HDMI cable it was a fibre-optic thing and cost about £200. Many of the built-in systems here run DVI (basically the same as HDMI) over two fibre pairs plus a cat.5! The tx/rx unit pairs for those cost something like £350 nearly 20 years ago but when they fail these days they can usually (but not always) be replaced by devices which ignore the fibres and just use the cat.5.
Oh, and the fact that some computers don't like our boosted cables. I have Lenovo and HP laptops with onboard HDMI which happily drive that 40m cable, while Surfaces and MacBooks (usually with external adapters) often baulk at the prospect. One regular visitor is so aware of this problem at various venues that not only do they bring a selection of USBC - HDMI adapters for their Mac; if one doesn't work, another might; they also bring an older Mac with inbuilt HDMI just in case. I had one person with a Dell laptop a few months ago who brought their own USBC - HDMI adapter which wouldn't work, but when I tried an identical unit from my own stock, it was fine!
Thought I'd found a way around the problem with the Panasonic PressIT device*. Bought a couple of units to try, and yes it does work, but for some reason it needs a tremendous amount of peer-to-peer WiFi to work well without judder and lag. With the number of competing APs in our building** it's always going to struggle to find clear space, so judder and lag are the order of the day. Not really a problem for a few PPT slides but not at all acceptable for video.
M.
*yes, the PressIT does have the disadvantage of another dongle for some idiot to take away with them, but at least it's fairly large and not a teensy little one for the "clicker" we lent out
**why can't I set my HP Instant-On APs to use channels 12 and 13 at 2.4GHz, or in fact anything except 1, 6 and 11? They're set to the right domain (UK/EU), but even on "manual" I'm not offered the option to juggle things about, just 1, 6, 11 - it would be far easier to find clear space if they could use 1, 5, 9, 13***. Corporate's Cisco APs seem similarly disadvantaged, and the numerous SOHO / domestic APs in close proximity just add to the problem.
***because I can, 2.4GHz is actually turned off on the HPs, but this isn't often an option, for compatibility reasons
(sorry, I could rant all day about this stuff)
I'm not talkng half a dozen APs in the same room, I'm talking about "adjacent" (in the radio sense) APs. Coming from a radio background and looking at the specs, even 1, 5, 9, 13 are effectively non-interfering (5MHz channels, 20MHz bandwidth) and ideal for use where the "wanted" AP is closer than the "unwanted" one and it's much easier to mesh four channels than three (c.f. cartographer's map-colouring problem), even in 3D.
All that 1, 6, 11 adds is an unnecessary 5MHz guard band. Might have been useful for "b" standard but not needed for "g".
Note how at 5GHz the channels are (mostly) 20MHz apart, not 25. 2.4GHz channels 1, 6, 11 are 25MHz apart.
The only trouble it would cause is where one of mine on (say) channel 5 is "near" someone else's on 6.
And for APs which are even further apart, it's possible to get away with 1, 4, 7, 10, 13.
M.
"he SVGA screw had been tightened by the hand of god"
Alternatively, when unscrewed they took the threaded pillars on the equipment with them and now the socket is free-floating inside the equipment - ow will be when a forceful attempt to insert a plug the wrong way up detaches it from the circuit board.
Brings on horrible memories of "wireless" displays at many customers (and indeed some of our own) offices. Invariably have to hunt down the dongle-thing, plus in the USB (on the mandatory 3rd attempt) and then go through all the hoops to get a connection that drops after 2 minutes, freezes or just doesn't work at all.
To their credit, our IT department does have our laptops set up to allow the most common dongles to install their required drivers etc (software install generally is locked down to admin-only, not for minions) although once or twice that's screwed up due to esoteric, weird or just plain Chinese-knockoff equipment.
Many is a time you just yearn for a simple HDMI cable that "just works".
Pass the brain bleach (or several cold pints) please nurse...
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of documentation............. and the 'simpler' employees (IE idiots)
We created a checklist to run if myself, the PFY, and the setters were not available in order to start the cells, a typical one reads
1. Turn on isolator
2. Press white button marked "power" and wait for alarm to show up
3. Press "Hydros start" , then press the red reset to clear alarm.
4. Press "Autorun" and wait for it to light up green
5. Press "cyc-start"
Nothing too bad there, except the PFY calls me down 5 mins after I turn up to have a look at the mess, our best guess is that the id 10 t put it in test run, hit start, then noticed it wasn't doing anything, hit reset to stop it, put it in autorun, then started it again, then panicked when it didnt do the expected thing , and hit E Stop.
And we're left sorting the mess.
I did suggest feeding the id 10 t to the PFY.... but I was told we're not that cruel.
Still gotta remember the old saying "You cannot make anything fool proof because the fools are far stupider than you can ever imagine"
Wheres the "head banging against a wall icon?"
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I did tech support for a uni. I usually worked in the computing labs, but I was doing staff support one evening . I got a call saying the av system in one of the lecture halls had failed , so I took a projector and laptop there. This was not easy as we’d had heavy snow that had turned into ice , and it was in the next building.
So, I walked (skidded, to be accurate) over there carrying a projector and laptop that, together, cost more than I earned in a month.
Got to the room, started unpacking stuff. Then I noticed, the av cabinet was switched off. I flicked the switch, and within ten minutes, the av stuff was running. This was a computing science lecturer who’d been using that equipment for at least five years.
There seems to be is a certain set of people in CS who completely breakdown when the pristine, error-free world of theory they operate in meets the reality of the analog, entropy-filled world of reality. Of course this is not unique to CS people entirely, but it amazes me the number of computer science folk who have trouble even considering the idea that voltages sag, noise is everywhere, or that the limits of spacetime apply to whatever they are doing.
Good documentation has quick reference pages, and more detailed chapters/sections and/or common examples that follow :-)
I find some man pages awful for that reason, the synopsis alone is too silly like "foo [options] [arguments]" but then you have to wade through prosy stuff to try to understand how to actually use the program.
I find some man pages awful for that reason, the synopsis alone is too silly like "foo [options] [arguments]" but then you have to wade through prosy stuff to try to understand how to actually use the program.
Best read in the order SYNOPSIS, DESCRIPTION and then jump to EXAMPLES (and yes BUGS.)
Even then there are examples that are contenders in the race alongside Finnigan's Wake or War and Peace and Proust's effort for length and impenetrablity.
I recently had to consult lvcreate(8) for the first time in years for an option I don't normally use and my gast was well and truly flabbered and that isn't the worst offender by a long chalk.
"the wireless connectivity standards field has more cowboys in it than a line dancing event at a denim factory"
"Mac users who feel that they are being treated like second-class citizens – because they are second-class citizens"
"any idiot knows to turn the screen on – but on the other hand our idiots are special"
These gems colour in a lot of the circus clowns in the support comic book.
I was fortunate in having the boss who chose to tend the VC kit and the special people using it. Later the existing PFY was already all over the tech. So I probably know as much about VC as Simon's special people. Certainly never used VC of any description - a technology along with social media deserve a chapter each in my Le Livre du Temps Perdu. ;)
Heh.
the video conferencing kit we have at [RedactedCo] for the conference rooms are (technically) managed by our support and A/V teams, but since these things talk to MS Teams, I get roped into trying to support the stupid things, which is a non-starter because I've not been handed any paperwork for them and have zero clue how to use one, outside of 'make sure the service account has the appropriate license, and is enabled and the password is in the department's password vault'.
I should probably carve out some time and play around with the one we have in the office with one of the people who actually support the thing, so I can at least use it correctly. :D
Did you work for the Press Association? One of the many curious things about organisation is that because it was founded by some parliamentary act, it deals with things like the Cabinet Office and Downing Street IT in a number of areas.
One of the oldest employees when I worked at PA was a guy who was on first name terms with a succession of government ministers and civil service grandees. He was constantly going there to deal with IT issues and had a pass that allowed him to go pretty much anywhere.
On retiring he was even thanked for his hard work at an official reception in Downing Street. The irony was that he was technically an "illegal immigrant", having arrived in the UK without papers back in the 1960s and had never become a British citizen. The security clearance process must have been bypassed on the false assumption anyone working for PA was already cleared.
> the wireless connectivity standards field has more cowboys in it than a line dancing event at a denim factory
Good grief, you read my mind!
Why these conferencing systems can't just use the industry standard, Miracast, is beyond me! These conferencing systems need you to install a silly little app on your laptop that practically does nothing other than connecting it to the device over WiFi.
On that note, Simon is also smart to not point out Wireless connectivity. The one in the conference room where I'm currently working at has nasty latency and frame rate issues if you connect wirelessly. I presume the manufacturer thought it's good enough for powerpoint presentations and simple display of spreadsheets, but well, try to hold a Zoom call or Teams meeting and watch the image degrade to a sloppy mess.
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