When a quick job doesn't end up being quick...
Long time reader but first time poster, I finally have a story good enough to share. This all happened yesterday.
Bit of a background, I work in IT for a company that supports various restaurants with their POS systems and other IT related stuff. All of these are owned by the same $Owner who loves to make last minute demands leaving us to figure out how to make it work. Most of the time it's repairing kitchen printers, but today's tale was something different.
**$Me**: Lowly IT guy
**$Manager**: Manager of the branch. Actually a cool guy who has decent basic IT skills and can troubleshoot the basic stuff himself. Very easy to work with.
It all starts with me relaxing in the office, having gotten most of the major jobs out of the way, so was hoping to take it easy. That is until I got the phone call from $Manager...
>$Manager: Help! $Owner just called and wants to use the VIP room to watch today's match!
I looked at the date and realised our country was playing this evening for the football/soccer world cup.
>$Me: I'm guessing you already tried hooking the laptop to the TV and using $FreeChannelSite to stream the game? > >$Manager: Yup, but the stream not stable and the Wi-Fi signal to the laptop is very weak. > >$Me: What time will $Owner arrive? > >$Manager: He'll be arriving an hour before the match starts.
Looking at the time it only gave me 5 hours. 4 hours if I exclude the travel time.
>$Me: Alright, I'll pop over and I'll see if I can boost the signal.
I then remembered the VIP room was actually the opposite end away from the router, and that the access point serving the main area is in the floor below, so it makes sense that the room will have almost no signal. Due to the lack of time though, running a cable from the main switch to the room won't be possible, as it will need to go through another private room which is also booked for the evening, and there won't be enough time to tidy the cable away. I searched the office and find a powerline Wi-Fi kit and a Wi-Fi repeater, decommissioned from other sites. Did a quick test with them and they still worked, so factory reset them, configured them with the correct Wi-Fi settings and off I went.
Arrived at the site, loaded up the Wi-Fi analyser app on my phone, and confirmed the room was getting a very weak signal, so $Manager was right. I installed the powerlines first, hoping not to resort to the repeater as I knew from experience how unreliable they can be, and $Owner would explode if the stream randomly stopped. One of the powerline modules acts as an access point as well which I know $Owner will want to use. And... it worked. Straight away with no issues. Connected my phone and did a quick speed test, and it was more than fast enough for the stream. Latency was also good too.
Thinking I could wrap this up quickly I then proceed to connect the laptop up... only to find while it was connecting, it was not getting a valid IP at all. Restarted the adapter and it still wasn't getting the right network settings. So I restarted the laptop only to find it took a while to boot up. During that, $Manager walks in.
>$Manager: Hey, how's it going? Is it working yet? > >$Me: I've managed to boost the signal to the room, and it's a good speed, but the laptop doesn't want to properly connect to it so I'm just restarting it.
$Manager connects his phone to the powerline AP, does a speed test too and he's happy with it.
>$Manager: Wi-Fi is good at least. Forgot to mention but when we connect the laptop to the sound system, there's no sound coming out at all.
Oh. Guess this job will take a little longer.
>$Me: Alright I'll have a look once the laptop's ready.
$Manager then goes off back to his job. By then the laptop has finally finished booting up and is happily receiving a valid IP and is able to connect to the internet with no issues. Loaded up the stream and it's running very smoothly.
Checked time and had 3 hours left. No need to worry right? The laptop connected to the TV is happily streaming so let's see why there's no sound. I hook up the sound system to the laptop's audio jack and yup, no sound. Looked at the laptop's sound settings and... yeah, the default sound device was the TV. Switched it over to the correct one and and boom, sound is now going through the sound system. Except... only half the speakers in the room had sound. The other half didn't.
I checked the amplifier and all seemed fine over there, however it was reporting it was only receiving the right sound channel with the left channel receiving nothing. I managed to nail the problem down to the 3.5mm to RCA cable, wiggling the 3.5mm side brings the left channel back but only for a fraction of a second. I went to find $Manager to see if he had any spares, and luckily from the store room there was one. Plugged it in and all was good. Sound is now happily filling the room evenly.
Except... the stream is for some reason now stuttering. I checked the internet speed again and it was still strong. I then noticed the laptop was a lot warmer than usual. Loaded up task manager and the CPU was on 100%. *Why*. Loaded up the processes, sorted it by CPU usage and there it was. To confirm what I'm seeing I load up the settings and y*up. Windows Update has kicke*d in. This laptop has not been turned on for over a year, and it's eagerly downloading/preparing the Windows 10 Fall Creators update. 2 hours left until $Owner arrives. Seeing there's not much I can do about this, I close the stream so all the laptop's resources can focus on the updates. I also decided to might as well remove the extra stuff installed on the laptop that could also be slowing it down.
An hour later with the laptop now having less programs running in the background and a lot less running at startup, it was now prompting to restart so it could begin the Fall Creators update. Seeing as how long that will take... not going to happen. I changed the restart option to happen well after the match has finished and changed the active hours to be after closing time. After all, there's also the Spring Creators update it will want to do as well. No time for that. I loaded up the stream, and everything was running smoothly, with just under an hour before $Owner arrives.
I let $Manager know it's all up and running, he has a look and is happy with it. I mention the laptop also wants to update as well and $Manager said he can handle it afterwards. I then make my way home as it's also the end of my shift, expecting a call about $Owner complaining about the laptop randomly restarting. Luckily the laptop didn't restart. Unluckily $Owner was still angry. Mostly because our country lost the match.