Recent Posts

Made a few changes the our dynamic playlist generation script.

This was mostly to work on better iTunes support. iTunes for some reason only likes "pls" extensions after a lot of testing.

I have been trying to point everything to our new playlist PHP library which helps with dynamic generation of RSS/XML playlists, PLS playlists and Windows Media playlists.

So I in the end redirected our old playlist files "listen.pls" "listen32k.pls" "listen64k.pls" and "listen128k.pls" to the PHP script.

After messing with a few things and testing this seems to now work. On top of this I have now submitted our station to iTunes to get added hopefully in the future.

On another note I have only just found out that SHOUTcast have moved to their new Version 2 Beta. I will be doing some research into this to determine whether it has any major benefits but it looks promising.

Since finding iTunes was very finicky with the radio I might now look back into XBOX support as I was having issues with the our PHP library for that setup as well. This may now be resolved with the ".pls" redirection.

I'll post up some details probably over the next week with instructions for iTunes and findings on the XBOX side of things.

Well as some of you may have seen the Radio seems to be going up and down a lot lately.

This is due to my main PC freezing up when I have been playing a new game. Since the music currently resides on my main computer it has been affecting the radio.

Now I had been trying to diagnose why the freezing was happening and as part of that I disabled restarting the computer after a blue screen. Now each time the computer freezes and I restart it the music stops streaming and locks up the radio and has to be manually restarted. Sometimes I forgot to do this straight away.

In any case one night I came home from work to my computer was Blue Screened when I wasn't even doing anything. On the next reboot one of my hard-drives in my RAID had died it seems.

So I have gone through the process of buying a replacement drive and received it last night.

I then installed it and expected it would rebuild and all would be good but the rebuild time was showing some excessively long times like 3 days. I could not seem to figure out why it would take this long seeming as I only have 1.2TB of data.

So now I am going through the process of backing up my data onto a separate hard-drive and then I will test all the drives individually (Probably breaking my RAID). This might take me a couple of days before things are back online. Might be time for me to look at the hardware RAID card I keep telling myself to get...

Well a bit of bad news. I had moved a while back the Mp3 data along with a lot of other general data (personal) onto a cheap and nasty NAS (Western Digital World Book Edition II)

This recently had a disk failure which I noticed and I was thinking of options between getting a more robust NAS box or a new Server which would have extra redundancy (Power supplies proper hardware RAID etc) and I could double up as a media center too hopefully.

Well my options were coming down to either the HP Data Vault X510 or a ML350 G6. Unfortunately the POS NAS box decided to pack in before I did anything and stopped working.

I tried power cycling hoping it might reboot and recover itself but no it wouldn't even turn back on after that.

So I am currently in the process of recovering my data through another machine which is looking promising but will take some time. I will then probably just run the files off my machine for now and I am hoping I might end up getting the ML350 G6 with Server 2008 SBS and just run everything off that. Depends on costs at this point.

In the mean time you'll have to chill out while data is being recovered and things get reconfigured.


UPDATE:

Ok well the data has been mostly recovered and now the Music is being shared off my main PC. The Radio is back online and functioning as per normal.

Will post more details later with final solution.

Noticed the Online Media Player was broken since the playlist changes.

I have temporarily fixed it for now, will need to change the overall player to use the new playlist methods in the future. That would be the idea plan anyway.

Might also look at making it utilize the MySQL database for relays instead of a half static method currently used.

Just a small update.

I didn't realize the Windows Media Player links were not 100% working on the radio page, spend a bit of time today revamping the playlist building library I created to handle the playlists better for Windows Media Player users.

These links should now automatically open in Windows Media Player, you still still need the Orban Codec pack for listening though.

Took this time to optimize and make a new class for this function too and cleaned up a bit of code.

Some of you may have seen the station offline recently and possibly seen it go down from time to time over the last few months.

Well had an interesting thing happen to the Radio Server. I used to run that machine as my main computer with 2 x WD Raptor 10K drives in a RAID1 for my OS. For a long time occasionally the system would lock up and the RAID would fuck up and have to rebuild.

I have in the past run numerous tests on the disks and they have come up clean with no errors. I thought maybe the On-board RAID controller was fucked and so when I rebuilt this machine for the Radio I used them as two independent disks.

Well about a week ago I noticed the Radio VMware was running very slow, so I rebooted it and it would not shut down 100%. I restarted the whole VMware box. When it came online it wouldn't show the Radio VMware, so I looked at the datastore and my VMware flat files were gone completely and any time I tried to do certain things the disk it would stop responding...

I tried a few things like checking through SSH on the box and it knew the file was there but said it could not access it. I even plugged it into another machine but it wouldn't see the partitions properly but saw another linux disk, this may have been due to VMware's partition layout which is a bit of a bitch, I couldn't find any VMware partition repair tools or any real VMware recovery tools for that matter.

All in all though I believe the disk was fucked. So I had to rebuild the VMware from an old backup I could find. I think it's running ok now, once I have it perfect I think I'll take a copy of the folder for safe keeping.

So it was a bit fucked, I don't trust the drive anymore, no matter how many times it came up clean I suspected something was wrong and I have had enough of the shit. So using another SATA II disk I had lying around.

Well I have decided to spend some time fixing up various playlist issues to make it better for Windows Media Player users.

The Radio page should now be updated for these users to use the correct Orban links.

I also got tired of waiting for VLC to fix their Web applets after they fucked them moving to 1.x so I have re-made the Online Media player so it works again.

It's a bit more tedious because you have to select a server, but it works.

I'm also going to now re-add the annual Christmas songs into rotation because it is that season!

EDIT:

Found part of the memory leak issue on the Back-End IRC script has to do with HTTP queries, will be looking into it more.

On another note, I have finished fixing up some of the error messages on the IRC bot and it's now back in operation.

This has also fixed the RSS feed and after some updating of details the RSS should be updating properly now.

Well I have now re-arranged the DNAS's/Servers and you will see some new servers available on the Radio page.

I am still working on the Radio IRC Bot, hoping to get that working 100% soon.

Well the Radio IRC Bot has now been moved to the new VMware image.

Since it was a fresh start I noticed some flaws in the bot not handling disconnections very well so I have started to add a lot of extra error capturing code on the back-end.

It's not 100% finished at the moment so I'll work on it over the next couple of days.

Well I have decided it might be easier to just start a fresh Debian installation and migrate the few things we need that way it'll be cleaner.

I have Debian and MySQL moved to it, next will be the Radio IRC bot back-end and then fixing the MySQL replication.

The Radio is currently back online, however the request system is having some issues that I'll need to look into a bit later.

All in all though I am fairly impressed with the performance. I was able to make a Debian 64bit VMware image now that the new CPU is 64bit compatible and yeah overall performance all-round is good and a lot less noisy which is good.

EDIT:

Ok fixed a few permission issues on the back-end causing it problems writing to the database which was not allowing song queuing properly etc. It seems to have also fixed the Request page bugs.


All I need to do now is get the MySQL replication working so the website has the same database details as the back-end for track ID's etc which I'll try and work on either tonight or tomorrow hopefully have a few things going on which might cause some delays.

EDIT2:

Ok MySQL replication has been completed, things seem to be replicating well at the moment and requests are now working again.

I'll be re-structuring the Radio DNAS's a bit later and also still need to move the Radio IRC bot.