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What a *bleep* of a day.


Kaida23

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Today was very frustrating, and I need to vent a bit. I initially went to post this in "Today..." in the Off Topic section, but it came out kind of long so here it is as a blog post you lucky readers. :)

 

I spent the day holding another tech's hand (not literally of course :P) and trying to show him how to upgrade the software in the new payment hardware we've been installing for the last few months, but some of the first sites were installed incorrectly due to a mistake in the instructions from the manufacturer.

 

Guess where we were at today? One of those first sites, you say? Excellent! You're not only good looking, but you're smart too. ;)

 

For the technically minded of you, the system uses a conversion module to simulate network communication over a 2-wire run and the module has both a standard CAT5 connection and a 24VDC RS-232 connection. The instructions say to connect both to the main board, so that's what we did...only to find out a month later that just the CAT5 was supposed to be hooked up, but it was too late. :ohnoes:

 

The engineer in charge of the upgrade assured us that the worst it would do is cause intermittent communication issues, but it appears to have done worse that that. We can load the main part of the upgrade (the OS, if you will), which has its own boot loader, but can't load the new firmware (drivers) or reenter the IP information (which gets deleted during the process), both of which use the onboard boot loader. So what happens is that instead of updating, the system just keeps rebooting over and over again without loading any of the new information. Fortunately, it still reboots and works properly if we're not connected to it. Thank God for small miracles. :pray:

 

I also figured out a way to test if it will take the upgrades or not pretty quickly during the first one (I only ended up with two units completely offline because I couldn't put the IP information back in afterwards). It's a bit time consuming, but it leaves the units online while we wait for replacement CPU boards.

 

Since the only way I've found to correct this problem is to replace the CPU board, I think the improper communications hookup has corrupted the file structure on them. I've brought this up to the engineer (who I'm sure is getting tired of hearing from me on this issue by now :lol:) several times but he keeps brushing me off saying that it's impossible. Personally, I think he just doesn't want to share the program for reimaging the boards so people think he's skilled and important when he gets the defective ones back and makes them work again. <_<

 

Of course, this is the same engineer who had apparently never seen these units in operation in the field until a couple of months ago when I had him on a site to help correct another hardware issue (what is it with these people and hardware issues?) and I ended up showing him several things about them that he had never seen. Things that I run into on every new installation. Things that I had to figure out how to correct on my own because they're not addressed in the documentation. Anywhere. Things that I've actually gotten calls from other companies about because they're having the same problems. I don't know why they're calling me and not the engineer...wait, scratch that. I know EXACTLY why they're calling me and not the engineer. :P

 

At any rate, after 8 hours onsite today we only got one of the units to take the upgrade. One. Out of six. On another unit we had to replace the CPU board (the last one we had in stock) after it looked like it was going to take the upgrade just fine and then decided to roll over and die on us when it came to reentering the IP info. :wall:

 

So now I have to call the engineer tomorrow and explain (again) why the upgrade didn't work (again), why it took so long (again), why they need to send us new CPU boards (again), then go back to the site (again) and upgrade it (again). Can you tell I've had to do this a few times?

 

I'm glad my boss trusts me enough to oversee this upgrade program in our area (believe it or not, he's pretty much left me to my own devices on this one), but if I don't start getting better support from the freaking people who designed and built the damn things, I might just say to hell with it.

 

I think I'm going to go back to school and become an engineer. It seems like it's a lot less work and has fewer headaches than what I do sometimes. :lol:

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