Just an update on recent downtime.

One of the data centers we use for hosting had a major power outage.

This caused the box to power off and it was offline for a while until the issues were resolved.

Once the power was back online the box was brought back up, however some of the services that should have been set to Automatic did not start for some reason.

Still looking into this but I believe I have now fixed the radio services at least, will progress with the rest as time permits.

On top of this issues are re-arising on another internet connection which we are having the service provider look into, hopefully they should be resolved soon.

First off Happy New Year everyone, hope everyone had some time off and enjoyed the break.

Some good news. We are finally moving over to a proper server for the back-end system. I am in the process of configuring everything.

So if the radio goes up and down quite a bit over the next week or so it will be because of this. Going to try and configure things a little differently but all in all it should work out quite well.

As the project gets completed I'll provide more details.

EDIT:

Ok after a lot of messing around MySQL replication is now working again on the server.

So the Website and Request system should now be working.

Well it has been an interesting couple of days...

I over the last few months have been getting "skipping" when listening to the radio. I thought it was just VLC acting up didn't think too much of it.

Well I got curious for some reason yesterday because it was happening fairly often. So I started doing some checking on the DNAS's and found that the source was disconnecting from the main hub.

I found that very strange. So I started doing some ping tests. Latency and packet-loss were fine.

So for a laugh I decided to see how long the box had been online thinking the DNAS's might of needed a restart and noticed some weird processes that caught my eye.

One was spawned as the "IRC Server" user and two as my Apache user. I was fairly sure the box was infected and after looking around it seems it got infected a while back due to the IRC Server having an exploit.

So spending a few hours I fixed up the IRC Server with a patched version and removed the infections that I could see, will probably OS reload the box soon but yeah fun times.

After removing the infections the DNAS so far seems to be behaving itself.

So I wake up the next day and find another server offline. Now after reading my e-mails I find that I have been taken offline due to billing issues... I know I updated my billing information on all the servers months ago and so I was fairly pissed off.

I won't name the company but after speaking to them, they had not updated their database properly so while I had provided the new details their system was not using it.

So yeah fun escapades. Good news is that hopefully upgrades all-round are coming soon.

Will provide more details hopefully soon.

Just a status update on what is happening over here.

We are working slowly on a new website which will hopefully have a bit of a face-lift from the current in some ways neglected version. I started working on the old one but I do not have the graphical skills to finish it and so it was kind of left broken and incomplete.

In this new website we are hopefully going to look at making this "Mobile" friendly while we are in the process so people can hopefully tune in using their mobile devices across a few of the more major Mobile OS's such as Android, iPhone, Windows Mobile etc.

On another front I am in the process of hopefully getting the redundant server I mentioned a number of months back which is going to fix the occasional outages that people run into. As mentioned at the moment due to some hardware failures the music was moved onto my main PC which freezes up from time to time. Moving this onto a Dedicated Server is going to make things much better.

So there's the status update for now, hopefully will have more news soon.

** UPDATE **

Also I have just changed the radio back to our old topology, we were running a SHOUTcast trans-coding Hub recently and after a report from one of our users we believe the Trans-coder may be causing slight connectivity issues or buffer issues on the streams.

So we have gone back to streaming 3 individual feeds (One per bit-rate) and will need to re-think our overall Hub picture again at a later time. The idea was that with the Hub we could have live DJ's fairly easily and it would decrease bandwidth utilization to the main server, we might re-visit it soon but it currently seems very unsupported so may be some time.

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.