Are you sure you didn't eat spicy food before bed and this was just a nightmare?
At least you got a new hat. That's the bright side out of all this, I say. -----Original Message----- From: wireless-boun...@wispa.org [mailto:wireless-boun...@wispa.org] On Behalf Of MDK Sent: Monday, December 07, 2009 6:50 AM To: WISPA General List Subject: [WISPA] One long @#$%& day! It's 2:30 AM... I just drove up to the house, and walked VERY fast inside. After all, weather.com says that it's 12 degrees and an 8 MPH wind. In their head, maybe. Outside of the little valley I live in, the wind's more like 25 mph. There's no snow on the ground. I don't make a habit of staying up late, but last night, I was doing one of those "let's just have some fun" looking around sessions on EBAY. Next thing I knew, it was nearly 3AM. Without shutting anything down, I just crawled into bed. At 8:45 my cell phone rang... I didn't answer it, but I did get up. Looked at my computer and Peer Monitor says... nothing is connected. Now, I have had some issues with one of the dist points a few miles outside of town. It had randomly locked up 3 times last week. Each time, I thought I had found the problem and not worried about it. The first time for instance, it was extremely dense fog, and I found the ventilation fan running in the box. Thinking I had sucked in too much damp, I just shut it off and rebooted. The locked up system is a mini-itx board and RB 14 adapter card W/4 radios... Obviously, I was wrong. Something was wrong. It had run since Friday, but now it's Sun AM and PM says I've been off for 3 hours. It's died 2 other times since the fog incident, so... Houston, we have a problem... I quick yanked on some clothes and drove up the mountain to the site, used the step ladder to get to the box lid and looked in. Restarted and everything went off just fine. But, it's now done this several times. And that's not good or right. I look in the van. Spare mini-ITX board, licensed. Spare RB14, 2 spare radios, including an XR5, just like what's up there. Anyway, morning zips by, and I have an appointment in the afternoon to switch a family friend's computer out for her. So, I go to do that and she's not home. That's odd. I could have sworn she said she'd be there at 2... I wanted to be home, nice and warm and setting up the new board so I could change in in daylight tomorrow. So, I go to the workshop and do some stuff I've been putting off and ... fall asleep, waiting for an OS install to finish. When I wake up, it's after 5. Must have slept at least 15 min... Sheesh. So, I get up, drive over to house, start the project. 30 min later, my phone beeps. Text message... Site's down. ARRRGGH. 25 minute drive to the site and I reboot it. Go home, pull out the parts and start to assemble the whole thing. It goes down again . Drive back up, restart. This time, nothing will coax it into running. Finally, I pull everything out, and take it home. Now the phone's going nuts. I just put 60 customers down. I take it home, cause it's COLD out there on the hillside... and everything runs flawlessly. Just to be judicious, I grab a config backup off of it, 'cause it's changed lately and my last backup is a few weeks old. I haul it up the mountain, put it back in place... No run. So, I go home, grab the spare mini-itx, use the backup config and haul it up the mountain. Won't boot. Doesn't even beep. Power comes on, but no beep. Haul it down the mountain, back home (this is .7 miles of rocky pasture I drive through at idle in 1st gear, then 5 miles of paved road. Takes 20 min round trip) with all the parts. Runs flawlessly. Haul it back up the mountain, plug it in, boots, but locks 5 to 60 seconds after booting. Inspect EVERYTHING (it's dark, so had to do it all by flashlight) again. I see nothing. So, I grab the spare RB14, switch the radios over and plug it in. Boots. Lights flash. Fire up the laptop and no. It's not working. log in through ethernet port... NO RADIOS DETECTED. Put old RB14 back in, change one radio. Boots up. Logs in. all radios detect, data flowing to customers. Drive home. Try to thaw out. The wind up there is 25 mph and it cuts like a knife through you. Log in from home and watch everything, suddenly noticed one of the ap radios has no clients. Odd. Look at config, looks ok, reset radio, clients begin to associate. As they slowly hop on, I'm sitting there wondering why this... and just then, PM suddenly starts popping up red. Sure enough. System locked. Drive up the mountain, put in second spare radio in place of XR5 and boot. (Spare XR5, was used for 2 weeks in temp site). System boots and runs and ... No link to the XR5. Try new pigtail. Dead. How strange. It worked fine just 9 days ago, and it's been stored in the ALIX board it was installed and working in all this time. As I'm sitting and watching while sitting in the van, trying to stop shivering with the heat on full blast, It locks up again. I reboot. Everything comes up, I had put the old XR5 in, and everything starts working - apparently it wasn't the pigtail, just the replacement XR5 that had no output. Waited 15 min, still running. Go home. Look at Peer Monitor. All Green. Suddenly, a bunch of stuff goes red, and it's all far away. Call partner. He's a whole state away, forgot he wasn't coming back from his relatives until Mon night... But the red stuff's near him. As is the workshop. It's now almost 11 pm. The van has almost no gas left, the nearest open gas station is 23 miles away. So, I drive to the workshop, to find out why on earth the shop and some other stuff was red, and everything's fine when I get there. Finally decided that I must have removed a routing statement earlier that I needed instead of the right one. Started going up the chain, looking at all the routing. No routing errors located, but the very last device before the backhaul to the site that feeds my town.... shows no link. I call home, son verifies... Site's down again. Said a few angry outbursts... Looked around found another new RB14, put ALL new radios in it. Determine the new RB14 doesn't look anything like the old one. Determined which slots are numbered which, so I can know which pigtails go where... Go to gas station, get gas. Stop at Walmart on the way back, get REALLY WARM HAT for the head, and drive back to the mountain. Somewhere in there I stopped and got junk food to eat too. Hadn't had food since 1:30 PM. Was feeling faint. That took over an hour. Drive back up the mountain, remove old RB14 and old radios, put in new. System wont' start now. Pull board and everyting, look at it in the light. See no problem. Put it back in, plug everything in, then I found I had bumped the "off" switch on the #$%&^ power strip. Flip switch, plug in PS, lights come on. Since no XR9 is in use now, a pigtail is wrong, so I get a new piggy and replace the old one with a UFL/NFBulkhead... Piggy is cold and it takes about 30 tries to get the UFL connector on, even tried "warming" it with my hands. Err, my hand shaped chunks of ice. It takes 3 sessions to get the pigtail in place on the bulkhead end. It took several to get the UFL end on. I was able to stand outside just long enough to push the threaded end through the hole. Go sit in van. Get out, get nut properly threaded. Get back in van. Tighten nut with fingers. Can't find tools I had earlier. Get in van. Finally, get out of van with gloves on, and hand tighten the n connector. Get back in van. Can't feel my hand touch my face. My hand can't feel the difference betwene inside the glove, in front of the incredibly hot air coming out of the heater, or touching the cold glass window beside me. I could not even get 2 minutes outside before pain so intense from the cold wind drove me back inside. Drive home. EVERYTHING IS UP. Oh, wait. Several sites are going yellow/red/yellow/green/yellow/red repeat adnauseum... So, I start looking. Finally, discover that the 3.65 backhaul has 120 to 400 ms ping times across it. Even though it's passing just 40 to 100KB of data. Restart both ends. No help. Then, I noticed that quality on end is zilch, but the other end is running 18 to 36 speed, instead of 54. Lock back faster end to 36 and pings drop to 2-8 ms. Great. Another bad XR3... This one's up on a pole, about 18 feet off the ground, on top of a hill at a wind powered site. I think it'll wait until tomorrow. Oh, wait... I ##$%%^ forgot to close the danged gate, so I drove back up the mountain. Closed gate. Wind is 5 mph stronger AT LEAST and 2-4 degrees COLDER than it was last time I was up there. The moon is pretty. Stars are awesome. I can't stand outside to admire them. Ok, the system's been up for long enough. I'm going to bed. Now it's 3:30 and I can't keep my eyes open. I hope I'm forgiven if I turn off the cell phone and hope to sleep in.... And I still DON"T KNOW WHICH PARTS ARE GOOD OR BAD!!!!!!! I'm going to have nightmares. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---- WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---- WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/
