On May 17, 2017, at 08:25, Rob Landry <41001...@interpring.com> wrote:
> There are two ways to insure you don't get put off the air by an update. You
> can test each update on a duplicate Rivendell machine that is not on the air,
> and only after verifying that it doesn't break Rivendell on that machine,
> apply it to your on-air machine; or you can decide that since your machine is
> secure enough on its private network and not exposed to the public Internet,
> you don't need to do updates at all. Myself, I prefer the second approach,
> not fixing what isn't broken.
FWIW, Rivendell is developed on machines that always have the latest CentOS 7
updates applied, so this provides a certain amount of insurance. It’s *not*
foolproof of course (suppose a “bad" CentOS update gets released after the
Rivendell version?), so Rob’s advice is *very* well taken.
> A few years ago, there was a company called Nassau Broadcasting Partners. It
> was the biggest broadcaster in New England and owned, if I remember right, 52
> stations. Nassau standardized on one of the more user-friendly Windows-based
> automation systems and began deploying it to all their stations. Now, this
> particular system is written in the Java programming language, and one day a
> jock in one of Nassau's stations noticed a message at the bottom of his
> screen that said: "A new version of Java is ready to be installed." He
> clicked on it, most likely just to make it go away, and the new Java version
> was duly installed.
>
> And then he began hearing stuttering and dropouts on the air. The station
> became unlistenable, and the usual things Windows users do ("have you tried
> turning it off and on again?") didn't help. Nassau's engineering team spent
> days trying to figure out what had gone wrong; it turned out that the
> automation system had been developed, tested, and deployed with one
> particular version of Java, and the new version was different enough to alter
> some critical timings and break the automation system.
There are *lots* of Java horror stories like this out there. I remember once,
when I was working for a largish broadcasting company that rolled out a new
web-based payroll application that all employees were *required* to use. Only
it wouldn’t work on any of the systems at my particular location! Problem was
that the Java version was “too new”. We had to revert the Java setup on every
system to an older version in order to make things go.
Cheers!
|----------------------------------------------------------------------|
| Frederick F. Gleason, Jr. | Chief Developer |
| | Paravel Systems |
|----------------------------------------------------------------------|
| Stult's Report: |
| Our problems are mostly behind us. What we have to do now is |
| fight the solutions. |
|----------------------------------------------------------------------|
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