Lalu, Mannu & Bush on a LOCAL CONFERENCE with VoIP

This was written long back… but as I am inching closer to completing my “Service Agreement” with Wipro these are the experiences I’ll remember forever.

19^th March 2009

7823_22.bin & 7823_final.pcap

Solved my first ticket(actually the closest to solving one in all my tries). It was regarding a conference call( they call it Local Conference.. I wonder why ;) )

Scenario-

Bush on his last visit to India heard a lot about Lalu turning around the fortunes of Indian Rails and Bush in his last bid to save his ass (after his Afghanistan blunders) wanted to follow a similar model in US with the trains there making huge losses every year. Thus he calls up Manmohan Singh to arrange a conference call with Lalu.

Now Mannu first calls Lalu with an invitation for conference without Lalu knowing that Bush is going to join along. Then Bush receives his invitation from Mannu. Then Mannu suddenly presses the ‘Join’ button and Lalu, Mannu and Bush are put on a conference call.

Leg M, assume its Manmohan Singh- has 3 codecs G.729, G.726 & G.711A(the initiator of the conference)

Leg L (Lalu Prasad Yadav)- A handicapped leg of the conference with only one codec G.729

Leg B(George Bush)- Has only one codec- G.726

Codec- Assume it to be a language… M understands English, Hindi and Bihari (yes Lalu and Mannu have been chaddi friends, it was only when Mannu decided to be a finance minister and Lalu decided to do a finance ghotala, they had to part ways)… L obviously is a Bihari and B understands English(and maybe some Urdu from his Pakistan connections but we’ll ignore it for once) … So M acts as the interpreter.

Client says- When the conference is established after sometime B speaks in English but for some reason M ignores him and replies in Bihari.. thus B is unable to understand and goes off the conference

In Layman terms-

The client believes that Manmohan does not wish to give out some internal policies to Bush and abuses him instead, in bihari. But Mannu does not know that Rabri Devi (Lalu’s wife) had done her MS along with Bush and thus he knows a bit of bihari.  Thus Bush feeling insulted and frustrated leaves the conference immediately.

My observation- M is a nice guy(everyone knows that) and understands the criticality of the conference and thus passes appropriate messages to both the persons.

In Layman terms-

Mannu is a smart guy and is also a close friend of Rabri thus knows about all her pre-marital affairs and thus continues talking to Bush in English avoiding suspicions by Lalu about Bush-Rabri affair.

I spent 10 days understanding the behavior of these people and for me all were nice to each other… understanding how vital it was and continuing the peace conference… but the client being adamant on his point wanted me to visit his office 20 kms from my place and test it along with him so that I could see what he had reported as an issue.

Ketan( my Team Lead ):You have this last day for the tests here, else you need to visit their office… and that’s one hell!!!

Me: Sure I’ll have my final tests along with Sourabh( my other TL ) and let you know.

Testing Session with Sourabh: It’s working fine( the conference is not consistent In Layman Terms- Mannu is a b@$t@Vd and insulting Bush)… What were you doing???

Main ghabra gaya… Sahem gaya… ab to watt lagi

Had a chance of running a few more tests before Sourabh could return from lunch… I was unable to reproduce the scenario, i.e. I was unable to see any problem with the conference, as observed by Sourabh

Observation(First in Layman terms):

But suddenly Mannu bored by long conversation between Lalu and Bush and realizing that this would continue for long, goes back to his reclining chair by putting the phone on SPEAKER so that he could easily help interpreting. But to his surprise Bush felt insulted by the indifference shown by Mannu, takes it personally and leaves the conference immediately. And this is when Mannu actually ABUSES Bush.

Frustrated with switching between handsets every now and then, LUCK BY CHANCE I put the Initiator( M ) on speaker… AND the voice path goes down between B and L. So the problem was when the initiator changes the device… in this case from handset to speaker.

This issue had been raised 6 months back by @V@Y@ to my organization. It was tested by both @V@Y@ Development team and my team… I wonder how every person testing this always switched the device and I in those 10 days of testing never for once did so.

That’s DODO J…

Lesson Learnt-

Trust your bad luck… cause that is the only companion you’ve had all your life.