The last time I put together a demo video, I submitted it for review by the folks on Business of Software forum on the Joel on Software web site.

Some of their feedback included:

• Audio required post processing, since background noise interfered with the spoken voice.
• Video was too long, and less than 3 minutes in length would be best.
• Transitions from one screen to the next were abrupt and obtrusive.
• The last slide showing the URL for more info disappeared too quickly.
• Wear a plain-colored dress shirt instead of a striped dress shirt, which will help video compression.

With their feedback in mind, I set about creating demo videos showing a nifty feature of the Spring Server platform: If you lose network connectivity to your virtual private server, you can log in to springconsole.com with any SSH client, and get an out of band console connection to your server to fix the network problem. Essentially serial console access to a VPS with an SSH client.

Originally, I prepared a single demo video, but after review with some in-house folks, came to the conclusion that this would not be a “one size fits all” situation. Some people knew what serial console was and how it could be used, and just wanted to learn how to use it here. Others would have no idea what I was talking about.

Accordingly, two videos were put together. The first is a “I’ll show you on the whiteboard” informal introduction to what serial console is and what it’s used for. The second is “I’ll show you on my laptop” informal demo on actually using it.

Whiteboard Intro: What is Spring Console?

VPS Serial Console Demo

We’re going to put these in a DynDNS-branded Flash player and on the DynDNS content delivery network before they go live on our site, but wanted to get some initial feedback from folks here on the blog (even though they’re just hosted with veoh.com above).

Tags: Demo, serial console, spring server vps

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 1st, 2008 at 10:25 am and is filed under Demo. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.