The way I see it, it looks like it can’t write the files because it can’t fetch them from the network. Without a lot dump I may very well be wrong, though.
I wonder if this being a digital billboard is actually cheaper than just hiring some workers to swap out the printed advertisement every, I dunno how often they normally change, week or so?
The benefit is being able to display 3+ different ads on rotation that change every minute or two. That, and labor is cheaper when they’re not 50ft off the ground
The digital ones are way more visible though, at least the ones I see here. There’s also some here that are printed but don’t have lights, for whatever reason.
I dunno how often they normally change, week or so?
Quick bit of googling suggests printed billboards have a ~$1k startup cost to the advertiser then a flat rate monthly fee, so I’d hazard a guess its probably 3-6 months at a time to amortize the startup cost
Er. Am I the only one to comment that this is a refreshing change to all the displays in shops, airports, etc that show the many ways that Windows errors and BSODs?
Linux on the desktop? Hell no, it’s on 80’ billboards.
Running Windows for digital signage always struck me as an absolute waste of computing power. Just shove some low power Linux SBC into it and forget about it for about a decade or so
A lot of the time, the whole company that runs the signage uses Windows, and the signage just uses one of their standard PCs with their standard Windows image. They probably already have a bunch of spares. Makes it easier for IT if they don’t have to support another configuration.
Why billboard system would have sane installed? I don’t think Debian or derivatives install it by default. Vnstat is also a bit odd, but maybe that’s just me. I assume they have multiple of these displays around and for them it would make more sense to use something more centralized, like zabbix, to monitor the whole network (obviously they could do that too).
assume they have multiple of these displays around and for them it would make more sense to use something more centralized, like zabbix
The one I saw a decade ago yielded SNMP to solarwinds (I know I know) rather well, but they mainly used PING on it to see when the radio link died.
Fancy that – when the parks n rec sites were converted to e-billboards, they had power but no net line, and “radio’s fine”. Show me an old linux billboard host and I’ll show you a canvas my inner child can’t wait to e-graffiti.
Wait a second. They used AMPRNet to manage these things? In here this kind of things are either hardwired to the internet or they use 3/4/5G uplink and while of course techinally possible either way to breach the system it’s a bit more difficult to find out proper IP’s and everything.
Once upon a time I had a task to plan a scalable system to display stuff on billboards and even replace printed ads on stores with monitors. The whole thing fell down as we couldn’t secure a funding for it, but I made a POC setup where individual displays had a linux host running and managing the display with (if memory serves) plain X.org session with mplayer (or something similar, it was about 20 years ago) running on full screen and a torrent network to deliver new content to them with a web-based frontend to manage what’s shown on which site. Back then it would’ve been stupidly expensive to have the hardware and bandwidth on a single point to service potentially few thousand clients, so distributing the load was the sensible solution. I think that even today it would be a neat solution for the task, but no one has put up the money to actually make it happen.
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