Kyocera Taskalfa 820 scanner

The scanner for some reason does not work right when I have a static ip address set. So I have it set to DHCP.  But you can not access the web page for the settings by the netbios name.  You need the IP address.

Setting up for an Election on the ENPS Server

When you are setting up for an election in ENPS on the server side you need to go to the News Wire Profiler and look for the AP Election Wire.  It will look like this.

The Wire may look more compact.  If that is the case click on "More" in the bottom left corner. Notice the active box checked in 2 places and the election date is greyed out.  You will need to uncheck both active boxes.  First uncheck the top one then the bottom one.

You will get a message about this causing the wire to stop capturing data, but you will need to click Yes. This will allow the date to be edited. Make sure you put the date in this format mm/dd/yy. Then check the active boxes again, top then bottom.

Next you will need to find the News Object Manager.  Inside this is a window called Election Processing. If this is the first test of an election then you will need to check the "build races from wire data" checkbox. After the first test leave it unchecked.

 The rest is up to IMD to set up the election in the ENPS clients.

Ignite won't talk to Hyper-X

Our Grass Valley Ignite suddenly and without warning quit working with the Chyron Hyper-X.  It turned out to be the Telnet was disabled on the Hyper-X.  There is a way to see if this is correct.  Look down int he bottom right corner of Lyris and on the staus bar it should say "II T" and if you do not see that then it is not enabled.

 
To fix this go to the Lyric program and go to Config > Intelligent Interface. 

Then check the box Enable Telnet and click okay.

After about 5 seconds the status in Ignite changed to green and everything was working properly.

Get the Global Address List exported to Excel

First off I found this site. http://support.microsoft.com/?id=238773 and followed the instructions to get the global address list copied to my outlook.


Basically it says In Outlook go to the Folder view. Find the Contacts folder and add a new sub-folder. Then go to Tools > Address Book... On this window go to Tools > Options... and change the Keep personal addresses in: box to this new folder you have created. Then click OK. Change the  Show Names from the: box to Global Address List and highlight all of the entries. Then go to File > Add to Contacts. Go back to Tools > Options... and change the Keep personal addresses in: box back to Contacts. Then click OK and close the other box.  This gives you the Global Address List in your Outlook.


Now you need to export it.  Go to File > Import and Export... and choose Export to a file.  Click Next. Choose Microsoft Excel and click Next. Then choose you newly created folder of the Global Address List and click Next. Pick a file name and click Next. Then Finish.

NewsEdit Import CNN footage

Our Grass Valley NewsEdit systems have had an issue with the footage that comes from CNN looking really bad. Turns out the import is defaulting mpeg2 files to bottom field first instead of top first.  Changing this corrects the issue.  Trouble is, this is hard-coded to be the default and will have to be changed by hand every time there is a file that needs to be imported. This was fixed when Grass Valley changed the system to Aurora.

Additional thoughts, maybe this will clean up the files that Grass Valley exports to mpeg2. When I get a moment I will have to try this out.

Antivirus 2010

So I had a user get the malware known as Antivirus 2010.  It was not prevented from running by our Trend Micro Officescan but was immediately destroyed after the install.  Unfortunately, the user could not open any programs after this.  She could however open a file and the program would open up fine.  I found this KB from Microsoft to help clean up this sort of thing. But this article was for the system.  Our users are not admins and so they could not have changed this key.  Evidenced by the fact that other users could use the computer fine.  So I did a search in HKEY_CURRENT_USER for .exe and found HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\.exe\shell\open\command and the default was set to "c:\somepath\av.exe" "%1" %* So I deleted the line and changed to "%1" %* 


Then I did a search on av.exe and found a few more lines that were very similar.  Once those were all returned to "%1" %* and the computer was rebooted, the user was back in business.

Putting Ignite Back Together.

So after we took the Firebox out of the equation the other night, we now had to put the new one back in.  This one did not come pre-configured. So I had to do all of the configuration with the Grass Valley tech on the phone.

Mostly it was put all of the cables back and set the ip addresses back like they were the other night.  But there is special software to configure the Firebox. 

I was told to install the software on either a scriptviewer pc or an ignite pc.  So I put it on Scriptviewer A (important later).  Got all of the configuration done and the ignite system seems to be pulling the data in again.  Got off the phone with the tech and had the production folks check it out.  No closed captioning.

Reset everything a few times... nothing. Ran around in circles and did a rain dance... nothing. I couldn't think of anything else.  Scott looked at the properties for the scriptviewer and noticed that the serial connection was  1200 baud 7 bit NONE parity and 1 stop.  That was wrong it should be ODD parity.  So he changed it and it worked but when he reset the computer it quit working.  Settings had reverted to NONE parity.

Turns out the Firebox config program left a couple of services running on the machine and they were changing the parity on the comm port settings.  We had to disable the services and then everything worked like it was supposed to.

Ignite Quit Receiving MOS Updates

Our Ignite system quit receiving MOS updates. Scriptviewer had nothing also.  We suspected the gateway pc at first. 

I went to ENPS and cleared the queue  and MOS deactivated all of the rundowns.  I then reactivated the MOS on the rundowns and the queue immediately built back up.

Pinging ENPS from the gateway failed as well as pinging the main ignite computer.  Must be the Firebox has died.

restarting the Firebox failed. It never came back up.

Added a second NIC to the gateway pc. Changed the original NIC ip address to above 192.168.0.100 and made the addin NIC to be on the same subnet as the ENPS server.

Then in Scriptviewer I went to ScriptList and News Server Setup.  I changed the ip address  in ENPS MOS to match the 192 ip in the gateway then click on build and ok

Next was to change the ip in ignite.  Go to Setup > News Servers.  Again ENPS Mos to the 192 ip and build.  Then a quick restart and all was back up. scripts were showing up and everything was updating as it should.

Checked the queue in ENPS and it had filtered itself out. But I did not think that would happen until after rundowns were deactivated and reactivated.

WSI Alert Monitor

So we have just recently had a problem with the video card on our WSI Alert computer.  Called WSI and got it replaced.  We have a DVI splitter cable to allow the local monitor to see the computer and a Gefen Cat5 9500HD extender to show the monitor to weather.  The video was not passing through the splitter after we replaced the video card.  So I looked at getting a Kamer VM-2HDCP.  The first 2 did not work and the 3rd would not work with our HP monitor in the weather center. So we returned it and got another Tripp Lite splitter.  Also the Gefen was not passing video either so we had to replace that too.

Moral of the story... avoid Kramer.  Their stuff has failed to work at every chance we have given it. We have tried them on other occasions and it has never worked out for us.

Fault Light on Neural Loudness Control

We have a Neural loudness control + Multimerge (does a great job BTW.) that occasionally gets a fault light that lights up.  It is still working fine and we can find no evidence of a malfunction. Just the fault light.  The issue is how do you reset the fault light?

Go to the home screen by pressing back until you get to a screen that says "Menu" and "About".  Then go to About.  Look for Reset fault light and there you go.  Why is it in the About section?

New Printer Woes

So we got a new copier/pinter/scanner/fax machine.  I have not had to do much printer replacement and this was a real eye opener.  First off I had the printer installed using the same name and IP as the old copier.  Because this went to all of the staff I was getting reports of problems printing all over the building.  ENPS had problems opening ENPS.  It was failing to open at the point of loading the printers.

Hindsight being 20/20, I should have installed the printer to another IP address and called it another name.  I could have then changed the logon script to reflect the changes.

But how I resolved it, I looked up the print driver and found it in: "C:\WINDOWS\system32\spool\drivers\w32x86\3".  This was a Kyocera Mita copier and all of the drivers started with KM... and it is the only printer of this brand.  So all other printers did not have this prefix on the drivers.

I then rebooted into safe mode and deleted the files.  Then on the next logon the printer got remapped and started working.

VCI ReportMaker Export issue

So we were setting up a new Sales Assistant and the VCI Orion ReportMaker export to Efficio was failing.  It was coming up as an export to .htm and we need a .xls file.  Changing the file extension in the drop down did not fix the problem.  But after adding .xls to the end of the exported file name, it did successfully export and now the exports are coming up as defaulting to the correct file extension.

More AJA DA issues

The AJA DA had an issue with another WSI product.  This time the TruView output was black.  Unplug the video output that is not working and plug it back in and all is fixed.

Weather Alert Doesn't Key

The WSI Weather Alert would not key this morning on the Utah Scientific HD Switcher. Key and Fill were coming out of the WSI box. And they were coming out of the AJA HD DA. Switching the output on the DA to another port resolved the issue. Strangely the AJA DA is now putting video out on the original port that it did not put out before. I don't know, but it worked.

IVDR won't load clip

So yesterday the News Q Pro had a clip that would load up and and immediately unload. The problem turned out to be that someone in news had started changing the settings in the edit bays. The video settings for the NewsEdits are supposed to be DV25 and it was changed to mpeg2. Which the IVDR's are not set up to play.

Changing the settings back and resending the video resolved the issue.