Setting up WordPress again
Moving everything over to the 64 bit system and currently setting WordPress up again. Normal service should resume soon…ish
64 bit movement
So for various reasons, I’m moving from 32 bit to 64 bit Ubuntu. Thanks to the wonders of virtualisation this is pretty easy and because most of the software I run is well tested, moving MySQL, PHP, Lighttpd etc over is easy.
Unfortunately, PatchWerk radio is not what I would call “Well Tested” and until half an hour ago I had no idea how well PD would behave on a 64 bit OS.
Initial results are in and it’s all looking good, The new PatchWerk Radio is up and running on the new server and assuming it goes ok for the next day I’ll move everything.
What will this mean for me? A little bit as far as what software I can run on my dev box.
What will it mean for you? Not much, hopefully nobody will notice any changes and that will be that.
Fingers crossed
Sporadic downtime alas
Always the way, fix one thing and something else becomes apparent. Currently I’m seeing the connection from PD to the Icecast server is getting dropped and then not coming back up. Don’t know if it’s the oggcast~ object, the Icecast server, or something in between. I’ll try modifying the patch to auto reconnect when it happens which should help.
Long term I’ve actually been thinking about moving this over to using libpd for all the patch playback, and doing everything in pure C. It’s certainly an interesting project, but definitely a lot of work. I’ll put it on the back burner for the moment but it may well make it easier to deal with much of this stuff, and possibly simplify everything a bit.
Try, Except, Always
So I spent some of the afternoon putting much needed try except statements into the DbInterface library and should have shifted out a few of the bugs. Hopefully, things will be slightly smoother running from now
Stop, Start, Stop, Start
Apologies for the intermittent issues. Partly due to my VPS provider hitting an apparently severe bout of network issues, now resolved thankfully. Also I’ve found I’m having an issue with the netclient abstraction that’s used to communicate between PD and Python. Proving tricky to track down at the moment, but I’ll start gunning for it and hopefully have it sorted soon.
Until then I’m afraid it’s just going to be a bit stop/start unfortunately.
Still hunting bugs
It seems that there’s still a bit of a tendency for the station to crash unfortunately, however, with the new daemon code it’s actually just the Python script that crashes out whilst PD will happily keep on playing. This does mean that the patch won’t change and a couple of people have pointed out to me that it’s happened for a while.
Looking at the logs there isn’t much information unfortunately, but it does seem that just before the logging dies, it’s always the same patch that gets loaded. I’ve removed the offender (not mentioning any names) and I’ll be doing some more investigation to work out what’s going on.
I’ve restarted the station with the full debug messages being logged now so hopefully It will give me a bit more insight.
Keep listening
Little bit of a hiccup but back on the air
The stream just went down for about 15 mins whilst I re-jigged a couple of things. The major change is that the python script is now considerably less CPU hungry, thanks to just a single line code change. I’m finding that the server is still a little bit funny and I need to do some more code simplification, but this definitely a step in the right direction.
Anyway, back to the noise!
Patch and Author pages added again
I’ve spent the evening learning how to make WordPress plugins and the result is that there are pages listing what patches are running on the radio and who’s contributed.
Check them out at thel inks above.
I’ve realised that the patch plays don’t seem to be getting updated at the moment, I’ll tack that onto the bug list and hopefully get it sorted soon.
Running Again!
Back on the air! And with the beginnings of some much more robust code for looking after things as well.
Things should be much easier from here on out, still always stuff to do but I feel like I’m on top of this again.
http://radio.rumblesan.com:8000/radio.ogg
Tune in and enjoy.
Looking more promising
So it turns out I spent an hour last night logged into the EC2 machine, not this shiny,new,fast VPS and I didn’t realise. Once I did I remembered to switch over DNS settings, ran up a copy of PatchWerk and it ran like a charm, having more cores to play with really helps and I think I might have gotten to the bottom of the loading problem.
It should be up and running again in the next couple of days and will be much more stable once I’ve put some more changes in.