Rain in Oshkosh Kills Webcast
Eoban and myself were in Oshkosh, Wisconsin for the Democratic Party of Wisconsin’s State Convention’s opening day keynote by Senator Evan Bayh. We were working with Bayh’s PAC All America PAC and their Blog Team (employing my good friend Ryan Alexander) to facilitate a live webcast of his speech to supporters. We had everything setup and running into Eoban’s Powerbook G4. That means ethernet cord run across the busy hallways completely covered by black gaffers tape, a direct audio feed from the sound board, and a camera mounted at just the right height to prevent too many obstructions. We had two Dual Xeon Servers provided with almost no previous notice by Karl and Ray at Steadfast Networks running Darwin Streaming Server by Apple. We ran a test stream that morning.
When everything was up and running, a storm hit and killed the building’s DSL connection. To make matters worse, the actual DSL box (which we thought was a T1) was locked in a closet that nobody had a key to. They had to call in someone from the Oshkosh Convention and Visitors Bureau to drive out in the rain to open the door (I was ready to take a sawzaw to it, I mean the mayor and county executive of Oshkosh was in attendance, how much could go wrong?) While we were waiting with the young engineer from the hotel who was doubling was IT administrator for the entire event (nicest guy) thought of the idea of running an internet feed from the hotel to the facility. The interesting thing about this is that the hotel is across the street, connected by a skywalk. So there we were, with what was left over of a 1000′ spool of Cat 6 Ethernet Cable, pushing through everyone and laying unprotected cable across the skywalk. So we had internet connectivity, but it turned out that they were provided a cable modem that had an internal NAT or router so that multiple computers could access the internet without any additional hardware. Now, had we had more time we could have routed around this but with the limited amount of time that we had there was nothing we could do other than chat with Washington about how fucked up everything was. I ran back out and went to the closet where the DSL was at and immediately unplugged everything and reset the box. After doing this I plugged ONLY my laptop into the jack and found that I was getting nothing. It said everything was correct, but the DSL box (which turned out to ALSO be one of those hybrid modem/routers) was giving me nothing.
Tired and a bit dirty we finally gave up on doing the live webcast and decided we might as well record the event so we could provide at least SOMETHING to AllAmericaPAC. After recording it (and finding it to be 3gigs) we had to take it back to Milwaukee to re-compress/encode and then upload to our servers at Steadfast.
We had everything PERFECT! God damn mother nature!
At least the video turned out GREAT. Way better quality than we could have hoped for. Too bad we had to compress it so much (the orig. copy would look great on DVD).
