MICS time not advancing - 11/27/15 07:43 AM
In advance, we're not (and have never been) Nortel dealers. I used to work for one, which makes me the closest thing we've got to a Nortel tech, and even then, it's been 10 year or so.
We have a customer (well, we're the local techs for the national account) that's come up with a neat little issue over the last year or so.
Pretty bloody heavily expanded MICS system (8 or 9 modules, if memory serves), 1.1 software, butt load of DID cards, analog mods, pretty much everything you could ask for. Note that. 1.1 software, ie: no way to back it up short of a pen and paper. And DIDs. If you feel like crying now, go ahead.
What's happening is that when they go to change the time (ie: daylight savings time, because 1.1 never had the new rules for it), they set the new time, and then the system never increments the time again. So we set it to Nov 25, 2:35 pm, and two weeks later all the sets are showing the date/time as Nov 25, 2:35pm. My initial thought was "oh, a reboot should fix that" but considering it's so old that there's no way to back it up short of handpacking the system, I kicked it up to the national account. They decided it's probably the software cartridge, so we sent someone out to manually back it up assuming (and having double-checked with two or three other Nortel techs, they had the same assumption) that the programming was stored in the software cartridge, power down, swap the cartridge, power up and reprogram from scratch. He was quite pleased to find that the programming stayed intact, customer was happy since the time worked, and we left it alone. And learned something.
Of course, come the next DST adjustment, they changed the time, and it stopped advancing again. It's gone back to the national support group, and I haven't the slightest idea what they're working on, but I'm curious as to whether anyone else has tripped over this, and what/if the solution was other than to sell a new system.
We have a customer (well, we're the local techs for the national account) that's come up with a neat little issue over the last year or so.
Pretty bloody heavily expanded MICS system (8 or 9 modules, if memory serves), 1.1 software, butt load of DID cards, analog mods, pretty much everything you could ask for. Note that. 1.1 software, ie: no way to back it up short of a pen and paper. And DIDs. If you feel like crying now, go ahead.
What's happening is that when they go to change the time (ie: daylight savings time, because 1.1 never had the new rules for it), they set the new time, and then the system never increments the time again. So we set it to Nov 25, 2:35 pm, and two weeks later all the sets are showing the date/time as Nov 25, 2:35pm. My initial thought was "oh, a reboot should fix that" but considering it's so old that there's no way to back it up short of handpacking the system, I kicked it up to the national account. They decided it's probably the software cartridge, so we sent someone out to manually back it up assuming (and having double-checked with two or three other Nortel techs, they had the same assumption) that the programming was stored in the software cartridge, power down, swap the cartridge, power up and reprogram from scratch. He was quite pleased to find that the programming stayed intact, customer was happy since the time worked, and we left it alone. And learned something.
Of course, come the next DST adjustment, they changed the time, and it stopped advancing again. It's gone back to the national support group, and I haven't the slightest idea what they're working on, but I'm curious as to whether anyone else has tripped over this, and what/if the solution was other than to sell a new system.