December 2009 Archives

Now its time to listen to soothing Slow Jams as Snakeice brings in true Gumbo mix fashion.
I actually started a while ago but have bee doing updates and system maintenance on my systems. I even updated the router to a new firmware revision today to help when load gets high.

Sit back with me while I listen to the mellow flows from the high tech Snakeice Den updating my systems and hopefully later kicking back a bit.

I was seeing one of the CPU's getting hammered on the server side and discovered that the normal mp3 encoders I was using was pegging the CPU to 100 percent.

This is why its good to have a test system, I was thinking it was network or driver related and took a few network services I'm not yet using away from my backup sever and that did nothing. I was about to get more intrusive and switch which NIC the music streamed out and look into drivers but decided to look around the web and Spacial Audio forums for clues.

I didn't get my exact answer but saw a mention about mp3 lame encoders. So I started up my streams on the test server and turned them off one by one and presto the mp3 encoders were the issue. I configured some mp3 LAME encoders and CPU usage went way down!

I guess the Windows codecs used by the mp3 encoders for my normal mp3 streams was the issue.

Made the same change on the production music server and CPU usage is now down to acceptable levels on the server side!

Watched a movie and then couldn't get back to sleep so came in to test my theories, now time to get a little sleep!

I did some memory tests and tried to get application to go to different processors but a bit hard to do without thread aware apps.

Taking music server down to inspect the memory for a moment, will be back shortly so no need to switch to backup server.

Switching to another system to use as music server! Making the switch due to the fact that the two new servers I was going to make into web servers have 32 bit Xeon CPU's and the current music server has 64 bit CPU's.

This way I didn't have to waste the 64 bit Xeon current music server on 32 bit Windows OS and I could move it to a 64 bit OS Linux platform as a web server which I am working on being a web server with stronger live multimedia streaming capabilities.

Now I can use the two systems I was configuring into web servers into my music server and backup music server fully optimizing the Windows 32 bit OS I'm using.

I'm also thinking of moving my former long running music server I moved out of service a couple of weeks ago into the role of another web server or backup web server role.
I also dug around town and found another set of rails so I could properly mount one of the new music servers the way I wanted to and added a gigabit NIC to each system to work with the onboard gigabit NIC and disable the 10/100 bit NIC onboard. I also added a soundcard to each for music preview and allowing of other input devices like microphone's etc. Then with configuring the systems to talk to my web server, firewall, databases, etc.., I'm ready to switch over to the new music server, again!

I also introduced another music stream at a higher bit rate for you audiophiles out there @ 320kbs and will place a link on my web page at some point soon along with some new listener links and the current link reconfigured.

I will be redoing the whole site on the new web site which is my former music server I just moved off of today soon.

Ok time o switch over to the new system!

Well I had a power failure and my systems bounced everything came up fine again except one table in my database couldn't be repaired that showed the history of what has been played and that type of information.

I restored from a point when I brought over the database from the other system that was streaming my music last week. The restore went fine but I have to do a few updates of music tags and recreate some music categories I have recently added to the database.

al in all I wasn't down for more than about 5 - 10 minutes with a few changes once up and running to bring everything in play.

Here's some mellow warm spiced flows to toast a chilled wintry night.

I fixed the comment submission error my sites were having with an addition I had added to add different comment capabilities. I had to disable this addition to get comments working again. I may revisit this addition at a later time.

Comments can now be submitted properly and you can use your logins from these services to leave a comment: Movable Type Native, OpenID, LiveJournal, Vox, Google, Yahoo!, AIM, WordPress.com, TypePad, Yahoo! JAPAN, livedoor, Hatena, mixi , Facebook.

Time to move into that infamous Snakeice stormy session to match the winter weather in the form of a raging "Quiet Storm".

This morning I updated the new server to hit the music categories to better play the music from those categories as well as setting and adding local artists category so they will play more frequently.

I also hit up Silks last night to see local artists specifically fellow Grant Pacer Alumni "CS Hardhitters" banging out their beats. Where they put on a nice bangin' show once they got on stage along with headliners "Big Rich" and some other Hip-Hop artists from the Sactown, Stockton & the Bay.

I have to say there is a lot of unknown & unheard Hip-Hop talent out there in this region!

The local artists songs I added recently are:

Feva In Da Funkhouse (Featuring more Grant Alumni Pacer) they put on a show Thursday at "Club Avalon" here in Sacramento I missed unfortunately I was stuck working on my server but I have seen them in person and they are a must see with band, vocalist & MC's.

I already told you about the personable "CS Hardhitters" posse tearing up the stage I saw @ Silks last night.

I also added local artists "Flossalini" from the neighborhood & "B Peezy" who were on the scene at the Silks supporting the Sactown Hip-Hop scene and promoting.

Well I finally switched over to a new music server tonight. This Server is using a Server OS so I had to enable some items that are non-standard on a Server as well configure my music to stream properly and update my web server. My previous music server has been streaming music consistently 24/7 365 since 2004 with minor breaks due to updates.

This server isn't totally new but for me is a step up with dual Xeon hyper-threaded (Virtual dual core a step before Duo-Cores) 3.06 CPU's with 7GB of RAM.

I still have gigabit LAN's onboard which is significant since my onboard Gigabit NIC's a couple of years ago on my previous server started getting flaky and I had to install a couple of after market Gigabit NIC's on that server to keep it going!

On this new server I had to install LAME & Fraunhofer codecs just to be able to play mp3's on this system! May have been overkill but I saw somewhere that Winamp used LAME and not Fraunhofer so just to be safe I added LAME codecs after Fraunhofer was installed already.

I had to forward the appropriate ports so folks could listen to the stream as well as enable Audio which is normally turned off with this server OS and install a soundcard and then install a USB soundcard for previewing music. I ended up uninstalling the first PCI soundcard I had installed since it wasn't working and installing a more upgraded one I had lying around.

Tonight I also found that if my music stream application pointed to an incompatible device it just sat there and looked at me. This took me a while to figure out what the issue was since it seems after reboot my music streaming application switched to the PCI soundcard instead of my USB soundcard I had installed to get going and for testing. Pointing to the incompatible PCI soundcard caused the song to appear in the appropriate music deck but wouldn't play!

I found out about the issue of not being able to stream with my incompatible soundcard while shutting down apps on my old server and switching to the new one since all my tests were with the USB soundcard had worked. I then found out I hadn't saved the router configuration from last night with the ports going to the new server and I had to do that all over again and reboot the router. Each time I could tell I was knocking folks off the stream, which I apologize for.

I also had to go on the Web Server to change the sever ip.address in a configuration file so the new system Music Server could be the one syncing with the Web Server's database and display the appropriate songs as they are played.

I even had to do a mass save of mp3 ID3 tags on my old server and then recopy over my mp3's again and do a mass ID# mp3 loading of tags into the new server. Each time I did this I also backed up the database from the old server to move over to the new server. Next I will have to run the utility to remove duplicates

Even after testing many late nights I ran into some new learning opportunities. Overall I had forgotten how much configuration and customization I had done on getting the music stream to where it is now and that's nothing to do with how the website looks and feels except the update portion.

The new server has loud fans so at some point I will try and upgrade to more quiet and power efficient fans as well as do some sound proofing and then some air flow control on my 7 foot computer rack but that's for later and its time for and early night getting to bed for me (1:55 AM), at least lately!