Aug 20, 2007

Lunch time thoughts

It is just about 12:30 in South Arkansas, so I thought I would chime in for a bit...

Today is the first day of school for most places in Arkansas, and for me, that means running around trying to make sure video systems are working. Well, three sites in the Texarkana LATA are down, but I had something of a brain-fart and came up with the idea to route video traffic across the data network as a temporary fix. The good folks at the Dept of Info Services in Little Rock thought it was a novel idea and said "go for it!"

Arkansas High in T-Town was first. Their local network had a few hiccups, but then we were able to establish a connection! We could dial out, and after about 30 minutes or so, we were able to get AT&T to dial in. Turns out, my solution means that video calls have to "appear" to be coming from off-network (basically meaning they have to look as if they are coming from outside the state). So, now a video call in the T-Town LATA goes from T-Town to Longview to Oklahoma to St. Louis then onto Little Rock, and back around again. It's a wonder anything works... :-)

During this writing, I am in Genoa Central, waiting for DIS and AT&T to figure out why we dial OUT but cannot receive a call... We believe the problem lies in the firewall that DIS controls - the video conferencing ports are shut off to prevent any willy-nilly from using video here. Normally, not a problem. Today, B-I-G problem... :-) Hopefully, we'll have it sorted out soon...

I'll keep ya posted...

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