Hi everyone;

I've recently been seeing some odd behaviour in a couple of iNews rundowns when monitoring-on (and it's always the same two rundowns).
When monitoring-on, the Monitor status indicator will go green indicating that the rundown has been successfully been loaded into Command.
But upon checking Command, the rundown is not present in the Playlists window.

Additionally, when an attempt is made to monitor-off the offending rundown, the monitor status indicator stays green.

I've checked my MAP file numerous times and cannot find any errors (although there haven't been any changes made to the file that precluded this behaviour.)

The only way to reset the false monitor that I've found is to reboot the iNews servers, which admittedly doesn't take long at all (less than a minute), but it's become a daily occurence.

I am, quite frankly, flummoxed!

 

The only thing that raises my heckles and makes me suspicious is that my users have developed an annoying habit of using the "FLOAT" function as a way of "saving things for later" or as an alternate way of indicating status on a story (for example, even in templates, they're using float to indicate pauses.)

This means that even templates end up populated with huge amounts of floated stories, and they then build rundowns based off of these templates.

 

Has anyone else seen this behaviour before?
Am I barking up the wrong tree regarding floats?

Hi Mat

Let me see if one of the broadcast iNews folks has any idea's.

Stand by

Marianna

Mat

I spoke with Kath in the iNews team and her advice is s follows:

" They should open a case with us, looks like we need to investigate those two rundowns that experiencing that issue. 

But to avoid them rebooting the inews server they can do this workaround: 

userclean <monitor device number>

example:  userclean 256 

They can do this when they try to monitor off and the monitor stays green. "

Strongly suggest you create a case on the support portal.  I can assist you if need be...let me know as my email is below.

marianna

 

Sorry for the delayed response Marianna; for some reason, I couldn't access the forums yesterday.

I would have raised a case, but my organisation decided to cancel support with you at the start of the year (NOT my choice!)

However, in the meantime, I have resolved it!

It turns out, it was a corrupt user; where my user profile had no issues monitoring rundowns on and off, when I went down to the gallery to see if there was anything in particular they were doing, I was able to quickly determine that whenever one of our directors was monitoring-on, no matter which rundown, it would get stuck and never register with Command.

I have since deleted the offending user profile and created him a new one, and everything is good now!

Apologies however; as noted above, rather than keeping the profile around to try and find out what was wrong with it, I deleted it.

Looking through logs, I did find a PAM authentication error, but I suspect that was simply the user getting his password wrong.

Edit: By the way, thanks for the command to clear a monitor, that's really useful.

I had an additional occurrence of this again today, this time with a different user, but exactly the same behaviour. With more time to explore, I initially copied the user's profile as a template, deleted the user, then created them again with the same name and applying the template. This "new" user profile exhibited exactly the same behaviour. So I recreated it again, but instead used a different, working profile as the template, while keeping the account name the same. Same again. Finally, I went back to our Domain Controller, deleted his account and created a new one, with a different short name. I then created the mirror account in iNews and set up their groups properly. This user profile worked with no issues. When I run "list u" on the iNews server, it doesn't list the user's old name, but obviously it's retaining some information about that user somewhere, otherwise new instances of it wouldn't be breaking.

Mat

Thanks for the update and the intel on this weirdness with the User profiles. Let me get this information over to the iNews peeps.

One important question........ What is the version of the iNews? 

Marianna