ChurchTechArts is the most widely-read and trusted website for production technology in the house of worship category. No-nonsense equipment reviews, production tips and philosophy of ministry discussions are all part of the three weekly posts. Written by Mike Sessler.
Building volunteer teams is perhaps one of the toughest things we do as technical leaders. Our panel today talks about building unity, training and retaining tech teams that serve one another and the mission of the church.
A few weeks ago, I wrote a post called, “When Things Go Horribly Wrong. Again.” In that post, I talked about our lighting console crashing (turns out we had a bad SSD), and how we recovered from it. That crash brought to light some major gaps in our backup process; ones I now hope we’ve closed.
In the weeks leading up to the backup, I thought everything was fine. We had an external backup drive attached and backup software that was supposed to be backing up every Saturday night. Turns out “supposed to” is the operative phrase. Apparently, it wasn’t backing up, and hadn’t for quite some time. I don't know why.
Normally, I’m a belt and suspenders kind of guy. I don’t consider any files safe unless they’re on at least two preferably three) drives or media, with one in the cloud. I like the 3-2-1 backup strategy (the link takes you to a PDF report of that strategy) that was developed in conjunction with the National Archives. All files should exist in 3 different places, on 2 different media with at least 1 off-site. I do that with our audio console show files, but we never set it up for lighting. Now we have. Here’s what we did.
Backup, Backup, Backup
It turns out that in the new version of Hog PC (v. 4), they included a handy-dandy backup button. It’s a one-stop-shop for making a backup of your show file. Somehow, it makes the backup files very small, but it’s still the whole show file. How can we not take advantage of that? Turns out, we weren’t. Now we do.
The standard shut down procedure on Saturday night is to first hit “Backup” to make a backup show file. That way, if things go south on Sunday, we can get right back to where we were. But that only protects us from a show file crash; if the hard drive goes again, we’re hosed. So, we back up the backup.
Dropbox for the Win!
Dropbox is perhaps the easiest way to back things up. Now, we could go into the Hog’s backup folder and manually copy the latest backup over to the Dropbox folder and let it do it’s thing. But that takes time and is a pain. So I automate.
Using a free utility from Microsoft called Sync Toy, I built a little sync script that will, when fired, sync the backups folder with the Lighting Backups folder in Dropbox. And again, we could launch Sync Toy manually, run the sync, wait for Dropbox to upload, then shut down. Again, a pain. And boring. So, we automate once more.
I stole a little batch file that Isaiah Franco made for me back when he worked here. It’s super simple, and basically does three things. First, it asks if you really want to go through with this. Second, it launches Sync Toy and syncs the files. Third it waits one minute for Dropbox to upload and then shuts down the computer.
We leave a shortcut on the desktop labeled “Shutdown PC,” and have the guys fire that to shut down. For those that are interested, here’s the .bat file. Feel free to mod it as needed if you like.
@ECHO OFF
:choice
ECHO Are you sure you want to sync the SD-8 files and shutdown the PC
set /P c=[Y/N]
if /I "%c%" EQU "Y" goto :shutdown
if /I "%c%" EQU "N" goto :abort
goto :choice
:shutdown
"C:\Program Files\SyncToy 2.1\SyncToyCmd.exe" -R
cls
ECHO Commencing shutdown in 60 seconds.
shutdown /s /t 60
pause
:abort@ECHO OFF
exit
When this runs, it simply launches Sync Toy and runs whatever sync folders we have set up. Within a few seconds, I can see Dropbox notifications on other computers that the files are updating. Cool.
Backup Hardware
One thing we noticed during that crash was that if the Mac Mini (running Win 7) goes down, we’re kind of dead in the water. Although, since it’s Hog PC, we just need another PC. So, I configured my laptop, which already had Win7 installed in VMWare, with the Hog software, and linked it to the Dropbox folder. So now, if the Mac dies, we grab my laptop, fire up VMWare and in a few minutes, we’re back in action. Maybe we’re limited in our ability to build big shows due to the monitor limitations, but we can run the weekend. But what if we loose our DMX widget?
Backup, Backup Hardware
We’d actually have to loose both widgets because we have two, but what if we did? We still have the ETC Paradigm system in-house, with a really cool touch screen in the booth. So one of our projects this summer will be to update the control programming on that system to include all the moving lights and LEDs, as well as a simple 10-cue page that would get us through a service in case everything else failed.
So that’s our system right now. In the last few weeks, I’ve been checking to see that the backups are actually working, and being pushed up to Dropbox. I now feel like I have one fewer thing to keep me awake on Saturday night.
LED houselights, a new lighting console from Martin, controlling a Blackmagic ATEM using Arduino, and Rassberry PI for dessert. That pretty much sums up the episode. Plus, an extended In The News segment!
I know what you’re thinking. What is a sound company doing making a tester for lampies? If I had to guess, some lighting guy saw the audio guy testing a snake with a Rat Sniffer/Sender and said, “Hey, can we get a 5-pin version of that?”
Kidding aside, the answer is—or will be very shortly—yes. I wrote about the whole Sniffer/Sender line back in July of last year. What started out as a simple 3-pin XLR tester has expanded into 1/4”, NL4 and now 5-pin XLR. My friends at Rat asked if I would be interested in taking a look at the DMX version, and since I’ve had to troubleshoot a DMX run or three, I said, “Sure!”
Physically, it looks very similar to the venerable 3-pin version. The system consists of two parts, the “sniffer” which has three red/green lights on it, and the “sender” which is basically a phantom power supply. You can test a cable or snake (or entire end-to-end system) using both units, or, hit phantom power on the console and just use the sniffer.
The DMX version works just like the audio version. Plug the sender into the male end of the chain, the sniffer into the female end and look at the lights. Three greens means all is well. Any combination of red and green means there’s a problem and you consult the chart to figure out what it is.
Personally, I love the concept of this. I’ve spent several hours over the past few years up in the truss trying to track down DMX runs. Once you get a bunch of cables up there, it can be hard to know which end is connected to what. With the sniffer sender, it’s easy to tell.
And here’s another hidden benefit: Since the lighting industry refuses to standardize on three pins or five, you can actually use the 5-pin and 3-pin sniffer senders together.
The other day, I was making some 3- to 5-pin adapters in the shop and wanted to test them. I pulled out the 3-pin sender and the 5-pin sniffer. The sniffer read two green lights, which I assumed meant it wasn’t picking up anything on pins 4&5. But when I tested the next one and got all three green lights, I double checked my first adapter. Sure enough, I swapped two pins. After a quick solder fix, I re-tested and got 3 greens.
The unit I have is a prototype, so I don’t have information on pricing and availability. I would expect it to come in around $55-70 or so, and it will likely be available before summer. For me, it’s a no-brainer to have all the testers. In fact, I want to make up a kit to house all of my sniffer/senders in one neat package. Since we church techs need to be multi-disciplined, this is a great addition to our toolbox. You can see the complete lineup of Rat Sound Tools at their website.
In the interest of full disclosure, my friends at Rat Sound gave me this prototype unit. Even if they hadn’t, I would buy one. They're that cool.
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