How I Saved The Universe While My Boss Was Watching

[serinde]

I'd gone up to the Audio-Visual Classroom & Media Technologies room to see how they do their funky thing (they have more student workers than any other of our groups). I went with some trepidation, but it went pretty well; they are just like the A/V crew I was on in high school. (shechameleon will know what THAT means...) It was getting on towards lunch when He Who Rules A/V came in to take a special delivery up to an important conference the School of Education was having, which was going to be recorded & then podcasted (podcasting is a Big Thing that our department is pushing). So I tagged along to see how it all works.

Initially their wants were simple: Audio recording foo (wireless microphone + whizzo tape recorder), and then a laptop which could plug into the room's projector unit so that the speaker could go to CUNY's Blackboard thingy for illustrative purposes. Well and good. First problem: the projector would talk to the laptop, but the image was completely screwed up. This is, however, a known problem, because the School of Education installed their own projectors and systems instead of going with what the rest of the college uses; so He Who Rules A/V dispatched a minion to get one of their advanced carts, which has its own projector.

Unfortunately, this transaction took up most of the time allocated for setup, so the attendees were already coming in when we were hooking it all together. Projector was fine, all was well--except they tried to go to the Blackboard site and found no intarwubs. They were stymied. I stepped forth: "I have some experience with this..."

ipconfig told me that it had indeed found a DHCP lease, though it was in 10.x.x.x not the usual network; but since I have no idea in what entertaining ways the network around here is set up, I did not question. (Also, I could ping the listed gateway, also in 10.x.x.x.) But, I could not get anywhere via IP address. The DHCP-assigned nameservers were indeed not answering queries. The room's phone was not plugged in & had no cable (!) so I asked He Who Rules A/V to phone the helpdesk and ask what the internal DNS servers were. ...Then I thought better of it, and suggested I speak to them directly. They transferred me internally (my name is Known! Huzzah!) whereupon I learned that Windows is a lying whore, and it will claim to have a DHCP lease when it does not, and just make up some addresses for itself; so I said "erm well, then I think we have a network problem." I did have confirmation from He Who Rules A/V that they successfully used this jack last week, but it is also known that the network guys have habits of whimsically closing off ports or doing other fun things. Oh, and they did sanity-check one thing I forgot, which was to make sure the blinkenlichten confirmed that the Ethernet was actually doing something (it was).

So, they transferred me to the guy who is in charge of sending the roving troubleshooters. He wasn't sure if he had a spare body or not, but would send one if he did. I eyed up the conference, which was already fifteen minutes in, and decided to go down to the helpdesk myself just in case they did not have a spare body, and if that were the case, beat enough info out of people that I could pursue the problem myself. However, they did have a spare guy, with a laptop and a spare Ethernet cable, and we went up to battle. Where lo, we did find that the ethernet cable that came with the advanced cart seems to be failing its duty, and swapped it out, and there were intarwubs. As I left to return the defective cable to A/V, I noticed that my boss was now in the back of the room. He looked much pleased and made approving comment to me on the way out. SCORE!~

Now, it may be noted that I really didn't do so very much myself; basic troubleshooting, followed by interfacing with the help desk, followed by following a guy to do what I would have done myself had I a spare cable. But! If I had not been there, it probably would not have happened, and the Important Podcasted Conference would have been shit out of luck. Instead, they had connectivity before they required it. (I think. Unless they wanted it while I was running down to the helpdesk.) I think this makes us look like competent problem-solvers, unless it makes us look like a bunch of twonks who can't get things up and running on time. But whatever our external image may be, nevertheless, internally I think it was seen that I did Good Things.

Edit: And I found out afterwards that the presenter NEVER ACTUALLY USED TEH INTARNETS. *headdesk*