I am trying desperately to get ready for a two-week trip to Brazil and still have not had time to do a full "postmortem", but I do have a few notes on what Ben said.
I will also copy Sterling Hough, both to let him know that we are analyzing what went on, and to thank his staff and him for keeping the school open on a Saturday for what must have appeared as a fiasco. Sterling can determine who on his staff would be interested. On Mon, 2007-04-02 at 23:58 -0400, Ben Scott wrote: > I've dropped the NHTI folks on the assumption that they are > uninterested in the detailed postmortem. > > On 4/2/07, Jarod Wilson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Finally starting to feel human again... > > Good to hear you're rejoining the human race. :) > > > I look forward to the full brief, particularly with respect to what > > the hitches were with the directions. > > Death of a thousand cuts, combined with a lack of preparation on the > part of maddog and I. We were overconfident in our knowledge that we > had Guru-level help available in you, so neither of us really had any > idea what to actually *do* once we got there. > > I do want to make it clear that I don't blame you in the least for > being unable to make it, Jarod. Shit happens. Both maddog and I have > enough experience with Murphy's Law to know that, if there's one key > member of an event, that person *will* be unavailable on the day of > the event. If anything, we are to blame for your family's illness; we > tempted fate too much. ;-) Actually the night before the fest I started having premonitions of "What would happen if Jarod did not show up", but I ignored them....because they were too horrible. That is another aspect of Murphy's law.....you deny Murphy. > > Issues were, in no particular order: > > - People who showed up with systems which did not meet requirements > -- One guy just needed to toss in his just-acquired tuner card; that > wasn't too bad > -- One guy was just a disaster: > --- His PC didn't meet minimum requirements for Fedora, let alone MythTV > --- Some kind of BIOS problem prevented booting from his SATA hard disk > --- Didn't have a DVD drive to read our install media > --- Couldn't boot from USB DVD drive > --- Dodgy CD drive didn't like our first CD-R install media > --- Started objecting to the package selections we were making > --- Ultimately, this guy was just being a twit. If it wasn't for the > low attendance, we would have just kicked him out. He did register the night before the event (so I read his registration early the next morning), and he knew that his equipment did not meet the requirements, but he wanted to "prove" that you could install to a much lower-end system than we had specified. So figuring that there would be three people actually doing the install besides Ben and myself, and that there would be three people "helping" (Ben, me and Jarod), I let him in. I did not know that two more people would just show up without registering or without even reading the web pages. Fortunately most of their hardware worked. Unfortunately lots of our directions did not. > -- One guy had an ancient TNT2 video card > - We forgot to specify a DVD reader drive as a requirement > - We need to intensify that checking to make sure the system at least > POSTs before showing up would be a good idea > - Fedora Core 6 anaconda installer installed i586 kernel on i686 systems This was combined with the fact that the PVR-150 drivers were not in the kernel, so had to be brought over. > - I was making stuff up as I went along, so order-of-operations was confused > - Create "/mnt/store" or whatever, and grant permissions, before > starting MythTV setup > - Downloading and installing the brazilian Fedora Core updates took > forever for new installs (two people) Uhhh, it took me a while to realize that Ben was talking about "a lot" of Fedora Core updates. They were not trying to get them from a mirror in Brazil. Sorry, I have Brazil on my mind lately. > - Three other people were already installed and updated, so they sat > around and waited while we got the installs going > - Two people got ahead of us, went to mythtv.org, and downloaded the > source kits, which just added to the confusion (since we're using > binary packages from ATrpms) We need to make this a step-by-step "MyTHTV for dummies". No one gets ahead, and no one falls behind. > - A couple people ended up setting their MySQL password to "ROOT_PWD", > since that's what the example did BAD EXAMPLE! BAD! No biscuit! > - I forgot to specify to create a regular user account to run the Myth FE > - I forgot to specify which commands needed root vs regular user privs > - "su" vs "su -" > - All the chaos and confusion meant everybody was out-of-sync all the time We also need to create greater discipline of not reacting or spending too much time with one person, but treat whatever ill they have at the moment and move on. > - Hauppauge PVR-150 uncertainties > - The MythTV HOWTO appears to assume we know what to fill in on the > brazilian different config options. Mostly, we did not. Here there > be dragons. This is where I realized that "brazilian" was a number and not a location. > - We had the wrong link for Zap2It registration, so everybody was > pre-registered for the wrong service. Just figuring that out took a > while. > - I didn't realize that you had to configure the lineup in the Zap2It > web UI; I attempted to do that in the mythtvsetup UI, which failed > miserably. > - HDHomeRun needs a DHCP server, and one guy had a crossover-cable > LAN, so we needed to configure dhcpd for him. This was because he wanted to put the HDHomeRun on a separate LAN from the rest of his network > - HDHomeRun + stock iptables firewall = Nothing works This person had also told us that he had a HDHomeRun, and had spent some time trying to get it to work at his own home. I knew that Jarod had one in his house and had used it, so I told him "no promises, but we will try". We did get him further than he had gotten before. > - SELinux is the debil > - One guy's Fedora install got all farked up on the first try (dunno why or > how) > - Once we finally got mythfrontend up and running, we had no idea how to use > it > - One guy's mythfrontend displayed video just fine, but had no sound > output. The system could play, e.g., WAV files though the sound card > just fine, but Myth was silent. We tried plugging speakers into the > audio jack on the tuner card, and that didn't help. > - We didn't know if the TV aerial (antenna) was any good, so we didn't > know if the problem was in the antenna or MythTV (or both) > > Maybe you'll want to get sick for next time, too. ;-) > > -- Ben I will also add that we were clueless about installing remotes at all, so even the people that did get most of MythTV working did not have working remotes. I think in all of that Ben forgot to mention that (total) six people (other than Ben and myself) showed up with systems. Four had registered, two with hardware we recommended, one with the HDHomeRun, and one with the "low-end" system. Two people showed up with no registration, but "reasonable" hardware. In addition, David Brooks of the Nashua Telegraph showed up and talked with people and took notes about Linux, why people were there, what they liked about FOSS, etc. David knew about Jarod being absent and "shirts happen", so I think his article will be more about FOSS and what would have happened if we were more prepared. He also interviewed some of the staff of NTHI, and I think that will give the school a little visibility. But with all of that, I think that three people left with working MythTV systems, and if Jarod had been there, or if Ben or I knew what we were doing, and if people had read the instructions and installed Fedora before they arrived, we would have been fine. As it was I think that most people at least walked away with more ideas of what they could do to get it working, and we walked away with more ideas about how to make the next one more successful, including the cloning of Jarod (Jarod, you always wanted a brother, right?) I think the "install MythTV" instructions need to be written "step-by-step", with each place that a person needs to make a decision (tuner cards, etc.) explained, then the whole thing tested in a walk-through, with the exact version of Fedora, etc. used. Given this outcome, I think that both more work has to be done on the "walk through" and perhaps another pilot, but this time engaging more of the college students, before we open this up to the general public. I also want to point out that the NHTI faculty spent quite a bit of time on Saturday keeping the building open, etc. md _______________________________________________ gnhlug-org mailing list gnhlug-org@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-org/
