Gayle Hudson, the
director of elections for Edgecombe County, North Carolina is experiencing
difficulty with her modems. I am
posting the text of the messages she wrote describing the problem and the text
of the message I sent when I called in some other people for their input. I am now posting it here in the hope
of getting a comprehensive response.
Gayle
wrote:
I have been
testing my modems again today.
The problem still exists.
After a modem is received, the status changes to "disconnect" and then
to "modem on line". When the
status is "modem on line" the last message is blank.
After some
time, the status changes to "waiting for call" and the last message changes to
"Lost DSR".
The
interesting thing is that sometimes when it says "lost DSR" and I try to send
in a new precinct, it changes to start and accepts the modem call. Other times it just sits there and
does not respond. In those cases
I do not hear the modem even trying to get in.
The phone
company has still not corrected the problem with the phone lines and the
rotary set up. That may be the
problem. I will let you know
after it is fixed.
Gayle
wrote:
I had my
phone lines fixed and have tested the modems again. The modem, after upload, still goes to
"modem on line" and after some time to "lost DSR". I tested today with two coming in at
the same time. The first com port
had already been used, so it was reading "lost DSR". When the two started coming in both
ports accepted the modems and uploaded.
In other words it did not freeze up. Hope it works okay on
Tuesday.
I don't have
much time to spare on Monday. If
you think this modem thing is a problem, please call. Otherwise I guess we'll see how it
works with all precincts reporting.
Gayle
wrote:
Before the
May 2nd primary, we talked about problems I was having with the modems locking
up after receiving a call. On May
2nd even though the message said "Lost DSR" , when a new call would come in it
would roll over and accept the call.
However,
during the May 30th Second Primary it did not clear. It locked up many times. I had to stop the ports and restart to
get all the modems in. Could you
talk to the technical people and see if they can come up with an answer to
this problem. If you recall, you
called me and gave me new settings for some internal workings. I thought it was fixed based on the
first primary, but obviously something is not right.
Gayle
wrote:
After the May
Second Primary I sent you an e-mail about our modem problems. Probably because so many precincts
were reporting at the same time, we had a lot of lock ups of the modems. But they should disengage after
receiving a call. I continually
had to stop and restart the modems so we could receive the next
data.
Tyler
wrote:
I am
disseminating this message in the hope that we can solve it. Gayle is running GEMS 1.14.11.0. When I get a chance, I will review any
e-mail traffic we may have had about the 1.14 releases and modems not hanging
up. In the meantime, I thought it
wise to distribute this to a wider audience. If initial investigations don't get
anywhere, I may post to support.