Notice From Disney on DOLBY/DOREMI

[Ryan Gallagher]

Forgive me, but the Dolby KB says it was designed to expire in November 2025. My question is, why? And then why make it unrecoverable?

root encryption certificates have lifetimes, set by the issuing authority. You’ve probably heard of random stories of web services having outtages because someone forgot to get new certificates issued before it was too late. It is the same concept here, except unrecoverable if missed, probably because you need the valid certificate to patch with the new one.

Up for debate is if they ever expected these units to be in service this long, or if they even had an option to get a longer lasting certificate back when they were designing them.

[Carsten Kurz]

These certs have been established in 2005 or so, when the first Doremi servers were developed. They had a 20 year life span built in. Then 7 or 8 years ago, Dolby acquired Doremi. I guess Dolby did not have these expiring certs on their monitors initially. Even relatively recent Doremi IMS2000 used these same certs. However, the issue has been communicated nearly 3 years ago already (early 2023), so, there was ample time to prepare. All notes dealing with this issue addressed both the Y2K24 bug AND the expiring certs at the time and offered a single update procedure to solve BOTH problems. I patched both our Doremis in summer 2023 already.

It's just that the final deadline is now approaching quickly.

[Gordon McLeod]

We did all of the theatres we look after last year and now we are flooded with "does that effect me"

[Josh Jones]

To what extend can we really blame cinema owners for this? Yeah, you should've someone competent running your booth, but on the other hand, since when did it become the norm that all of our expensive infrastructure is rigged for self-destruction?

I thought that was the point of series II

[Pete Naples]

We set ourselves an internal goal, of having all the known estate updated by the end of Q1, 2023. Whcih we achieved. Have come across the odd spare server/IMB tucked under a bench, literally a handful.

We too are innundated with these notifications. Does nobody read anything these days though? Loads of enquiries from sites with GDC/Christie/Barco/Dolby DSS servers.

[Marco Giustini]

Does nobody read anything these days though? Loads of enquiries from sites with GDC/Christie/Barco/Dolby DSS servers.

Reading is so old-fashioned in 2025.

[Frank Cox]

Does nobody read anything these days though? Loads of enquiries from sites with GDC/Christie/Barco/Dolby DSS servers.

A lot of people have no idea what equipment they have. And even if the equipment tag that they see says GDC or Barco or whatever, who knows if maybe this mysterious thing that's going to die is an internal component somewhere that can't be seen from outside of the case or rack.

If I wasn't 100% certain of what I had here I would be checking too.

[Harold Hallikainen]

Reading is so old-fashioned in 2025.

True. They need to do a video on TikTok.

[Leo Enticknap]

A couple of years ago a customer approached me who had a Series 2 Barco with an ICMP in it, with Communicator showing a low battery warning. We gave her a quote for a service call to replace the battery (we did not sell or install the equipment, and hadn't had any contact with her before), which she did not like the look of (for which I can't blame her: given her location, that quote had to include a plane ticket and a hotel night). Just swapping out a battery can't be that difficult, she responded, and asked if I could provide instructions for her to do it herself. Following copious, bold, and highlighted warnings to the effect that if she did so and failed, she would have a bricked ICMP and a bill in the high four figures to get her screen back up, I provided them.

About a week later there was another email. The instructions (snipped from the service manual) I sent were too complicated and difficult and she couldn't understand them; but not to worry, because she found a YouTube video in which the procedure was demonstrated, and after viewing it she successfully replaced her battery and was now looking at two nice green status LEDs.

I guess it's a case of each to their own when it comes to learning methods. Self help and training videos drive me up the frickin' wall (especially those hideous Q-Sys ones in which the instructor wastes half the running time making childish jokes), because it takes me roughly 10% of a typical video's running time to learn the same stuff from a service manual. But it seems that others are the other way round.

[Ryan Gallagher]

They don’t call it “YouTube University” so no reason.

The trick is, kinda like with AI, it imposes an assumption of expert knowledge on the part of the content source. When in fact that may be extremely distant from truth. It takes “some” level of experience to spot bad advice in both forums.

[Caleb Williams]

Finally received some info from Dolby; on the IMS2000, if you have to replace the system flash after the certificate extension deadline, you'll need to make sure that the new flash you install has 2.8.52 pre-installed on it. If you try to use the 2.8.30 software version you may undo the certifcate extension and thus cause the server to be permanently non-functional. I asked Dolby for an updated goldemaster image and they happily provided it.

I'm not sure they vet the replacement parts going out for these servers, so any part you get you may just have to re-flash with the correct software version just to be safe

[Leo Enticknap]

Thanks Caleb. Given the failure rate of these SSDs, Dolby needs to be seriously proactive about getting that word out. I'm sure that there is lots of inventory of replacement SSDs still sitting on shelves with earlier versions. If Dolby is right, then inadvertently installing one into an IMS2000 without checking and updating it first could brick the IMS2000.

This also means that any tech servicing these things will need to have a 9-pin Dupont female to USB2 A male adapter, in order to be able to check and reflash a drive using their field laptop BEFORE installing it into an IMS2000.

[Ryan Gallagher]

We got the notice forwarded from DTDC the other day too. Now I’m curious how many other studios and distributors are gonna join in before the deadline,

[Carsten Kurz]

A colleague had his ShowVault updated a long time ago. I checked his certs individually (taken from Detailed Report), and I checked his status screen in Diagnostic Tool - but he still get's a warning about expiring certs. As far as I know, this is still his first and only IMB. I still suspect that there may be other pre-existing certs on his system that may cause the check to false-trigger.

[Caleb Williams]

A colleague had his ShowVault updated a long time ago. I checked his certs individually (taken from Detailed Report), and I checked his status screen in Diagnostic Tool - but he still get's a warning about expiring certs. As far as I know, this is still his first and only IMB. I still suspect that there may be other pre-existing certs on his system that may cause the check to false-trigger.

This seems oddly like the issue we were having on the IMS2000. Has he run the cert-cleanup script from Dolby? I think its only available via the ftp site.

I'm not entirely sure that they actually check the certificates themselves and instead just added html components in for the alert, then removed them with the certifcate update package. On the ShowVault it may be similar.