server
It’s been such a long weekend. After going to a nice park in the hills where hang-gliders land with Courtney and Wopek, we went to Amoeba… I got some OOP Keiko Abe and Evelyn Glennie, score!! The latter has a fifteen minute recording of Michi on it… it’s really great. I have new ideas for improvisation already, although I’m not fast enough to play what she plays. I also got old Jawbreaker on the cheap, and the last GYBE album I didn’t have.
That was the short part of my weekend. Then, I spent about six hours yesterday and twelve hours today installing and configuring the new KSCR streaming server. It was incredibly frustrating, but I learned a lot. Two Ars threads (here, here) and a trip to CompUSA later, here are some things I wish I had known:
- The kind of flush-mount racks that computers use are different from the flush-mount racks that audio equipment uses, even though they have the same mounting holes. The racks for computers are actually telecom racks, which makes sense considering the origins of the server computer. There is no reason for this, other than to frustrate rackmount newbies.
- KSCR’s studio B rack is about as beat-up as they get.
- The copy of Win2K Server that Dell ships with its servers does not come with Terminal Services installed.
- The drivers that come with Creative’s USB sound card offerings do not let multiple applications sample from them at once, unlike any other normal sound card.
- The popular Winamp line-in plugin floating around will only pass through to Shoutcast or Oddsock with these settings: 44100 Hz 16-bit 2-channel dev 0.
- Of the server components out there (Icecast, Icecast2, Shoutcast, WMA): Shoutcast has the least features, Icecast is the most stable, WMA is the least useful, and Icecast2 is the least stable.
- So, Icecast would seem obvious, except that if you try to run two concurrent sessions, the second session’s compression will not be able to keep up with the output bitrate, even though CPU utilization never reaches 100%.
- Icecast2 is the only one that really does this properly.
- The plugins for Winamp that allow DSP chaining are brilliant and beautiful.
- ISD takes about 12 hours to register a new MAC address for a faculty/staff account.
- Oddsock2 is probably the best m3w replacement Winamp plugin.
I also learned that working for hours at a time in a 93?F room is very bad, when I almost passed out after moving some heavy crap. I guess I should’ve remembered that from the summer in NJ when I fell over and nailed my head on a piano. Oh well, today I drank about 3 liters of gatorade when I was in there.
There’s a ton more, but I don’t remember right now. This would really only be the second or third time where I’m completely responsible for the status of a mission-critical server. No major screw-ups yet (knock knock).
So, where did my weekend go? #