The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the goat; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them.
I used to have this book, Networking for dummies. It was really interesting. It had these sections, where if something techincal was about to be discussed it would warn you. Something like.. if you read this, your head my explode. Well.. this is one of those excerepts.
KTEX is doing their morning show from the new civic center tommrow morning. No problem right? If it was just callin’s or something like that or dodge arena, i would just say, oh, take the Scoop with the Tmobile account on it.. but this is the Morning Show. 4 hours of Jo Jo and Patches. This has to be high quality stuff. ISDN would be preferred, the same method as the stock show, but this is the civic center. not a real event center. So… I thought hey we have three scoops that use G.211 over POTS. A modem in each unit. A mic and headset plug in each unit and it encodes and decodes both signals digitally and tranmits with a phone line like a dialup connection between each units. The first problem was hooking up the studio. I could swap the scoop for the ISDN in the studio, but they still use the isdn and i would want them to begin using the scoop more so i wanted a more perminate connection method. So i was begining to think of wiring a whole other connection to a da and then distro it to each control room, and then i thought.. what about Lia?! we’re not using her any more. It was comming out of a DB9 connection from the satelite so i took that out, made a converter swapped the genders… paired both L&R together. Now i need foldback. A return from the control room back to the remote side. I kind of cheated on this one.. there is already a talkback going to the ISDN so i just Y’ed the existing feed and split it to the scoop. Ok.. so now i need a line going to it. I have tons of pots comming out of the pbx. so i used one of those first. went from extension to extension… nada. well it rang but woudln’t link up. so i went pots to pots. that worked. ok.. so i just had to allocate one perminatly to the scoop. i’ll work on that one later.
so fast forward to today. The venue is saying they can provide a wireless internet and a phone. being city of mcallen i know they are talking about a cisco ip phone. so i made it clear i needed a pots line. get there today, well no yesteday but the lady went into a meeting when i got there at our arranged time so i was like, screw that, and i took off to meet the decorator.
i would need a pc with connecivitiy to the internet for vpn and vnc, and a pots line for the scoop to connect to the studio. it has to be able to dial weslaco or vice versa. My plan was to take the bridge, connect to there wireless, then take a PAP and get dialtone off of that, as well as hook my pc’s to it for access to the automation system.
today i get there and met up with Bud, or Bob.. something like that. The old guy who took the posistion that guy had offered me. And old like Mr meek old. who just started like three weeks ago with the city. you could still see the spark of hope in his eye. not like the seasoned city employees dispare that is so common. He tells me that the cat5 jacks are wired for internet, so great i woudn’t need the bridge. I wired the pap up to it, plugged in my butt set and it got dial tone right away. i hooked up the scoop and tried to dial the studio. it connected but tons of errors. i gbuess these pap’s weren’t designed for modem use. ok.. so bob is like.. well there are some pots in the phone demark room. and is this place setup like a normal place with one phone room? nope.. there is a demark room, that supplies patch to part of the building, and like 4 other phone rooms providing patch to other rooms and sections of the event center. so cross connecting is doine with multimode fiber and 50 pair cable. i think acutally the demark room takes 66 punch blocks to each patch room. so there isn’t any cross connect between rooms other than just the demark 66 blocks.
orignially, before the cisco system, they had a partner system running throughout the building. it was being supplied by pots, but really it was a PRI with a ADTRAN converting the lines to analog to an RJ22. The extensions were wired with RJ11’s. So.. on the partner system, there was RJ11 jacks, wired to one of the 66blocks then wired to a phone room, then wired to a patch pannel to a designed room and jack. So bob found one that went to the room that supplied our room and decided to bypass the partner and take the cable straight to the RJ22. But he didn’t have any tools, again still green at the job. so i went to my car and got my tools. on the way back he got caught up with VTX wireless (rgv wireless) they had a booth at the event and wanted to setup there antenna outside and wire it insde the building. Gees, since there wasn’t a central patch system this was really hard. I felt bad for them. but didn’t offer any suggestions as i followed them around waiting for bud, to be done with them. they wer talking about wireing through the air ducks, and all sorts of wired things. i’m sure the city would love that.. tearing up there new building.. anyway. so bob finally got away long enough to open up the room for me so i cut off the RJ11 and punched down the wire to the demark. i took a few minutes in there to scope out the config. they really had a slick wiring job and equiptment, just a bad layout.
so after that was done, i found the jack i needed in our room, found bud again, and he cross connected the 66 to that jack in the other patch room and we had tone. Great! oh.. while i was in the demark room i tried to call my cell to find out the phone number i was on, but it didn’t have open long distance.. so i tried the studio.. same thing. ok.. i called patti she can tell me the caller id info.. and she did. (i love her so much) So now that i have the number i would be able to call from the studio. but.. the line i picked at the studio was one i took from st jude. i’m sure they didn’t get valley wide calling on it. so how am i going to dial from weslaco to mcallen? hum..i know.. i can use the pap. the pap has a mercedes number. i can forward that to the mcallen number. so i had weslaco dial the mercedes number, and it rang the mcallen number but the connection was very broken up. lots of errors. (sigh) ok.. now what? go back to weslaco and move the line to something that has valley wide? i don’t want to have to drive all the way out there. i know.. i have a pap with a mcallen number, i’ll forward that to the stuido in weslaco. so i did that.. and dialed up and it worked! after 3 hours of racking my brain.. it was finally ready. so now i’m all set for early EARLY tommrow morning to get out there and setup this up and pray that everything works without any problems.
