I wrote some 'blog' type notes while up in Edinburgh, these contain some techie stuff, and some personal stuff, and are pretty much what I thought was important at the moment of writing. Well worth reading of course the blog index is here
Much that's useful for the future are thoughts about the tech setup... so I'm going to splurgh and work on them below...
The media centre was in a building that we knew already had one ADSL line. We had paid for another phone line, and had ordered a 2M ADSL line for it. Between the two it would have been confortable to run the radio stream (to a site that would then distribute) and the usual uploads (and lots of browsing downloads).
The ADSL line ordered was stalled. Then it was cancelled, because BT decided they couldn't get a 2M into the building (despite the other line already being 2M!). This meant the order had to be recreated as a 1M line, which added another week onto it, leaving the start time well into the g8 protests - basically too late.
The ADSL line that we were using came through PIPEX who suffered some terrible routing problems. They also managed, on one of the more important days, to take their whole network off-line for the best part of the early morning to maintainance! That can't happen often.
A call had already been made, particularly on the Edinburgh Linux Users List for others in the area with connections who might be able to support wireless links to the building. There were several offers, some of which might have come off. If we had the time they would have been excellent back-ups. However, a primary wireless route out became a focus.
Courtesy of some folks in London we had some really nice antenni. These it turned out were good enough to pick up a signal from the local Uni's omni, intended for internal wireless connectivity. With a user account it was perfect... Except
When the rain came and the the signal strength plummeted
When we had the antenna 'fall' off the roof (probably because of some pissed folk tripping over the cable on the roof when they shouldn't have been there)
When the antenna had to be moved as a 'dangerous structure' which was put there in full view and photography of the Met Police FIT, but was also pretty obvious to all on the road below too.
These difficulties were finally helped by there actually being another ADSL line into the building... which the owners were more than happy to share. Thanks must go to those cabling wizards who helped remake some of their ethernet cables so they were more reliable.
Can I sing the praises over and over for the hard work of people who made up ethernet cable. We got given lots of cat5 and we bought lots of RJ45 connectors, but it takes some effort to make them into cable, and without some experienced folk I don't think we would have managed.
We certainly would not have managed without a cable tester - this was a bit of kit we were missing, but was kindly donated and was essential
Much of the made up cable has been kept, so for the next mobilisation there is a good selection of lengths of made up cat5 :-)
Other cables were suprisingly easy to come by, there seemed no shortage.
This is a section that could and should become a full discussion wiki - but I doubt it will. Very quickly for now...
How do you end up with enough computers to run an independent media centre for a major event? We managed to get donations of some high spec machines... the picture desk folks provided some powered machines, essential.. the video desk really lacked some permanent machines. Lots of people bring their own laptops. However well used as these really were, the majority of people didn't use these... we needed a good number of computers. At the ESF this was really low spec computers running as thin clients, this time...
We bought 50 PIII boxes (two batches off e-bay) with various specifications for a decent amount of money, monitors were sourced mainly thanks to one person and a couple of local recyling charities (it looked dicey at one point - and could have been a disaster). The Compaq boxes bought presented their own problems, but hey ho. It was good to have a load of boxes. There number used in the public access space was only 20; others were used for Radio space, sent to other IMC spaces in Edinburgh and Glasgow, and used for spare parts! The number of boxes was good.
The specification of the boxes was adequate for basic web browsing and text editing. They just about managed some picture editing - in fact I am suprised at how much picture editing they ended up doing! They generally automatically accepted and mounted USB connection for camera/mem stick - but there was some strange anomilies on this I never got to the bottom of.
At the moment the expectations of a box in a media centre is that they will access the website - well it's essential, they will accept a Memory Stick (at the least) and a USB camera, you can open a picture editor, and (the killer) you can open and edit Word Processor Documents. The last point being a bit of a killer as low spec machines are not going to do the bloat of Open Office.
While the computers all managed to get a small HD which was basically running swap space. Rather than put anything on the Hard Disks they were all booting off the network.
Because of time, and it would be good if people could add to this, we were just running a standard Knoppix NFS boot. Worked fine (except when some of the hub/cable/net-card connections weren't reliable enought). However Knoppix included a bit too much bloatware and did tend to hang with network issues.
Knoppix has far far too many programs, some too large to load over a network and then run on a 128M machine. It also has lots of default features that are counter intuitive to a M$ Windows user - do you click once or twice? A simple light version of a CD distro that is designed for Media Centres would be brilliant!
No more needs said than it was just one of the PIII's and except for fighting to find network cards it would work well with, it was absolutely fine! Ideally we would have split its jobs between machines, which was the design and intention, but it didn't happen for a number of reasons.
Booting over the net was also an issue with some machines, was it network card, cable or hub? Well all factors were issues. You need some decent stuff set up to get away with it.
Essential to getting people to use any of the computers, be it uploading pictures with the card reader onto a Mac, working out how to open a picture on a Knoppix computer, or what ever. Help, help, help! One person isn't going to be expert in every machine either! Volunteers to help ask questions, point in the directions of answers etc have to be on hand all the time.
It really depresses me that the only experience people get of computers running Linux are crappy old machines that don't do what they expect, but really wouldn't be doing anything of use if they were running Windows.
However it becomes essential to have some decent hi-spec machines to do video and photo editing [all the radio was done on dual processor PIII machines literally cobbled together with varying success and then running a version of linux]. These machines had the speed people expected, the card readers etc. They did still, however, need people on hand to help use them - and the 'techies' that set up the rest of the kit weren't the appropraiate people to help... Yep it requires specialists for that sort of skill to be on hand too!
This requires a special mention. We really scraped through with hubs. Essentially we needed lots. If you are planning you need one per table, one per server etc. And they need to be decent. People will always turn up with small things - great for tables of laptops. But running NFS boots for 10+ machines?
When lots of people, from all over the place, lend you kit they tend to want it back! Even with just plain name labels on stuff this didn't quite work out. However, labels with mobile numbers on them seemed to work more effectively. It seems a good move not to upset people who have been great enough to lend us kit.
The primary focus has to be users expectations, and to a degree 'limiting' these expecations. We can't produced a media centre with top-spec machines. We need people to realise that running xxxx is going to kill their computer. However, we should work toward making a Linux distro that is easy to use (like down to the point it does GUI Window things expected when clicked on once etc) that includes auto-mount USB storage, has a picture editor people can use and has a 'word processor' people can use... I'm not too sure what to do about .mpg's and the like (maybe someone can help..?)
Other stuff to work on has to be multiple points of connectivity. Plenty of reducancy with connectivity and computers. Lots of the extras you forget about, cables, switches etc.
Not just tech redundancy, but techie redundancy. We need to communicate what has been done, how and why (well it's a good learning curve anyway). Involve as many people and keep them able to do as many things as possible.
Who can do? New people need to be introduced to as many people who can help as possible. Maybe it would help to have a list of names and what your doing/have done?
