18 March 2010

Niue #5: The Gear Arrives!

Friday is airplane day in Niue. The one weekly flight from Auckland arrives a little after noon and about 1/4 of the country turns out to meet it. This is the off-season for tourists, so the flights are running about 1/2 full, mostly shuttling the 30,000-strong Niuean diaspora to and from their ancestral home. My wife, Jessica, was arriving on this flight. So was Taiichi's girlfriend, Cookie. So was our equipment. It was a big day and we were at the airport waiting with everyone else.

After meeting the ladies, we had lunch at Mr. Lee's house, near the airport. Mr. Lee was a Chinese chef who had been stranded in Niue in part of a work-permit scam (long story). He had been fishing the night before and presented us with a wonderful meal assembled from local ingredients. We couldn't stay as long as we liked, though, because our cargo was ready for pick-up and the customs office closed at 16:00, just like everything else.

That evening, we set up the BTS at the guest house to be sure nothing was damaged in shipping. After a visual inspection, we connected the unit to a battery, booted the CPU and then... not much. Asterisk was hanging on DNS because there was no real network to connect it to, so anything that relied on a SIP transaction was timing out. But unlike at Burning Man, we had Tim there and he knew how to fix it. A few minutes later, we placed the first-ever GSM call in Niue. Later that night, Tim made his own blog post, with some photos, too.

4 comments:

  1. Hey, no bashing burning man! the dns worked there, eventually :)

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  2. actually, I recently had a problem with domain name resolution on linux, and found out about the existence of the nscd daemon (name server cache daemon) used by glibc, so I postulate if we killed it then it would have solved the hangs! (not that I remember exactly what was wrong, except the on-off wifi connection).

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  3. Would you mind sharing the fix Tim did to make Asterisk work without an internet connection? I have run into this issue recently as well.

    Thanks!

    Caleb

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  4. http://www.airshoes.us

    http://www.frenchtn.com

    ReplyDelete