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.