And Finally...

Well, that's me mostly packed and ready to leave halls for the summer. Looking towards the summer it's going to be busy but fun. I prefer it that way as it gives me something to do. Due to not being able to find a room, I will be commuting next year across Fife. It should be interesting being out of halls for a while.

Talking of something to do, I got bored a little earlier and knocked together a demo. I don't expect to get paid work out of it but I will be sending it to voluntary stations closer to home. As it's constructed from tape recordings, I can only apologize for the noise in the background.

It would be fantastic if you could review it for me. To listen to it click here.

It's All Over

Well, that's it for this semester. Now that exams are out of the way, I can look towards the summer. There are a number of projects I'm looking to do over the break including AllDay DJ (commercial and STAR), STAR's new website and a couple of smaller things.

All of that and working part-time as well. Should be fun!

Debian and OpenSSL - UPDATE

Kieran has informed me that we are no longer susceptible to the risk posed by the Debian OpenSSL issue now that the machine starfm is updated.

On reflection, it seems like a stupid bug to induce through editing code you don't know about. At least it's fixed now but it shouldn't have happened in the first place.

This update also flagged some bugs in AllDay DJ. I know about them already and will begin fixing them after my last exam. Until then, AllDay DJ seems to handle endurance as long as nobody goes fiddling with it.

Let's just wait and see what the next bug is... (for either program).

A Mixed Day

This morning saw me going to the midnight showing of the latest Indiana Jones film. Based on the mixed reviews it's had so far, it was better than expected. Not an unexpected ending is all I'll say so as not to give away the surprise. Let's just say it's not the usual Indiana style.

So after a good start, I thought I may be able to continue the trend with my car's MOT. Apparently not. Only one failure point thankfully, a cracked gaiter joint. I don't honestly know what it is but it's only £60 to fix.

Fun and Games

I never told you, but I got a better contract at work. This means I work in the same place, do a slightly different job and get paid more. You can't complain about that. What's more, I am doing exactly the same job until I get training.

The only downside so far has been the pressure sale by the union to get me to join (being perminant staff now). I didn't fall for their sale but it was worse than trying to reject an extended warranty (being an ex-salesman I know how bad those are).

...2 out of 4 ain't bad...

Ok, when Meat Loaf sung it, it was two out of three ain't bad and he didn't sing about academic topics either. What am I on about? Exams. That's all the exams for CS2002 (Advanced Computer Science) over with. What's more it didn't seem to go too badly.

The slightly more interesting topic of Internet Computer Science (CS2003) is tested later in the week. I'd better get cracking with the revision.

Late Night Love Songs

So my alternative to "Late Night Love" on hospital radio has shifted from Wednesday nights to Saturday nights. A bit of a shock at first coming in on a weekend but fun none the less. It's also made a bit more fun by the crew on before me who just happened to remind me of the AGM next week.

The journey home was "interesting". I was most of the way home, behind another vehicle. This person in their big, expensive car attempts to overtake the queue of traffic. Failing just before a blind corner, they pull in front of me, causing me to slam on the brakes! I dropped back to a safe distance just to watch this person tailgate the car in front all the way in to St. Andrews.

I've got the person's numberplate. Should I report them?

STAR Gets Titles

Well, we had them with the last playout system and they are surprisingly useful. What am I on about? Track titles. After a few hours of mucking around with source code, we now have dynamically updating titles from AllDayDJ (star makes use of an in-house build). Being truly honest, most of the code has been sitting there for a few months, it was just activating it and killing bugs but it seems to be working now.

Though I think I may have gone a bit far by making the message user friendly...

    "Now is More Than Us by Travis followed by Captain"

That's with a short title and artist!

Talking Servers

Last night saw Kieran giving the society a talk on the current server setup and the proposed setup for the new server.

Amongst the more interesting facts were:

* Wired's e-mails are spam filtered by the university mail server. Even though my inbox is full of messages about "love sticks" and pills, most of it is apparently dropped.
* I am not allowed to blacklist logcheck emails as spam... :)
* On the new server, there will be a virtual server dedicated to the resource intensive service that is.... IRC.

* Kieran is to retain root access until at least the summer is over as he has physical access working in St. Andrews. Working in Dundee, I'm still too far away to stop him.

Still, it was a very interesting presentation. I thought I'd better not write about it on the night due to the consumption of small amounts intoxicating beveridges.

Interview

Well, it appears the telephone interview must have gone better than I thought as I was asked to attend an assessment day today. It was the usual stuff such as group exercises, interviews, typing tests, etc. As for the results... I'll hear back soon. I'll let you know then.

Debian and OpenSSL

Well, you can usually rely on Debian to be secure and stable. It still is. But a story has been published recently stating basically the Debian edited version of OpenSSL doesn't create very random keys. Looking at the source code, it appears that they commented out a line of code that obtained a block of memory (but doesn't write to it) then reads it. This is a bug in most programs as you don't know what's there but works reasonably well as a random seed.

As we no longer have such a random seed, the keys become predicable. Just like old computer games. The reason: random number generators are not actually random. I was taught at school that they follow a list of random values that is pre-set. So the same seed will produce the same numbers. Which actually proves useful for testing. Not so much for keeping things secure.

Kieran has informed me the servers have been updated (bar starfm as it takes out the playout system when we do it).

Premium Rate Numbers

Stories have broken in the past few days about ITV being fined and the BBC paying back money due to running premium rate scams numbers on TV programs. Although both of these broadcasters have been held responsible, I do feel the viewers do have to take some responsibility for calling these numbers in the first place. Nobody forced you to do it!

What's more, broadcasters don't even need to run competitions using these numbers. Yes, I can understand the economics of running such competitions but do you really need an 0845 number? Though a quick poll of local radio and TV stations show a number of them using 0845 numbers though thankfully a fair number do not. In the voluntary broadcasting projects I've been involved in, phone numbers given out on air usually start 01...

There are websites out there that will provide you with a mapping from premium rate to regular numbers. However, these do have a flip-side. Working at a call centre (not even answering calls!) I occasionally get calls asking for help from a department I'm not involved in. Why? The website SayNoTo0870.com have published some of the direct dial numbers for the desks in the office.

How's that bad I hear you ask. Well, direct dialled calls can't always be transferred to a charging queue. Also, don't bother asking for a direct dial number for the department you're after. We aren't told them. What's more, I'm not going to let you get away without being charged when I'm charged to call these numbers. Why should I pay and you not?

Anyway, rant over! (Hurrah!). I did promise yesterday to tell you how the phone interview went. Well... I was fobbed off at the end with "we'll contact you within a week...". The interviewer was not chuffed in me wasting their time after being told this by asking about the rest of the selection process.

Meetings

Well, yesterday saw the first meeting with me as Head of IT/Tech for STAR. Pulling in a record 3 attendees (thanks to Kieran and Adam for turning up) we did get a few problems solved.

 

One that was touched on by Adam in his blog was about live bands on STAR. Occassionally, we do allow this for small bands and the tech team provide assistance. However, once you get above 2 or 3 people, things start to go a bit wrong. We only have 4 microphones in the studio for one. Also, STAR's studio is very small.

 

Two suggestions were made to fix this: set a hard limit on the number of members for live groups or pre-record the session for playout later. I suppose if need be we could link up from another room using a porable mixer if we really needed to (the union has a rather large room directly opposite STAR's studio). Unfortunately, any action in this area has to be made by the comittee as it's a policy decision. I think I'll take my asbestos suit to the next meeting when I suggest restricting live performances.

 

Also, a number of things have been "inherited" from my predicesor. Usually these are good, e.g. all PC's running Mac (DJ / News web browser) or Linux (playout, servers, file storage, etc.). But there have been a few surprises. For example. we have a wooden rack currently holding just as portable sound recorder. We also have a flight case holding all of our non-portable compressors. I'll let you figure out the flaw in that one...

 

In other news... I'm due to get a telephone interview tomorrow for a better paid position at my work. I'll let you know how it goes...

Keeping an Eye on Things

To keep an eye on servers, systems administrators often make use of
various monitoring tools. For example wired makes use of programs such
as logcheck, integrit and tiger. These are all valuable tools checking
system logs, file changes and system changes (these can suggest an
intrusion has occurred).

Being useful tools, they also tend to
e-mail the administration team with regular updates. The down side -
they can do it several times a day. For example, my inbox currently has
various messages along the lines of

May  7 23:03:40 wired sshd[304]: error: PAM: Permission denied for illegal user root from aaa.bbb.com

Ah,
the joy of botnets. I know this is the downside of such tools but
something I will have to put up with as we look out for real problems
that are within our control.

P.S. The root account is disabled for remote login if you're feeling bored / silly enough to try it.

Flying, Crashes and Crunches

Well, today saw the publishing of a story here about a "near miss". From what I've read here, the pilot was showing off the plane to his kid, performed some turns. He then has to climb to avoid a mid-air collision.

That sound feasible, until you understand they claim he was too close to the plane in front and turns slow down an aircraft. In fact, it's one of the technique the space shuttle uses for landing. I've got a feeling the two parts are unrelated but that's probably just me.

Now, demonstrating aircraft to kids has gone wrong in the past. I remember reading about a Russian airliner that entered a spin after the kid accidentally disengaged the autopilot. It was a tragic ending to this flight.

I treat flying as safe and enjoyable. In fact, it was the reason I joined the Air Training Corps. Though, based on the accident reports I read during bad weather on my gliding scholarship, things can and do go wrong.

Forgetfulness and Last Minute

There seems to be a rumour kicking around that students always do things last minute or forget all together. I'd like to dispel this myth, but I did not get out of my pit until 0845 today therefore running late for a tutorial. Not a good move but it's the last week of classes and I've lasted out so far.

Anyway, yesterday we were asked to provide assistance for live artists on one of STAR's programs less than 24hrs before the show. Thankfully, a few of the tech team did step up to the plate and help out! But, we technically should have said it was not doable.

On the forgetfulness front... I did walk in to the studio the other day to a recorded show still running on loop from CD the night before. It looks as though they expected people to turn up at midnight / 1am to stop the CD while they were away.  No great problem fixing it... but it gave me an excuse to play Meat Loaf on the radio!

A bit of tech update as well. Wired's new server seems to be moving along nicely (according to the updates I've read from Hash9). We are going virtual with this server using Xen (the hardware supports it). Should be a fun new experience as we currently run separate boxes. However, the assistant sysadmin (Jaunty) does claim he's had training in virtualisation. A possible scape goat when things go wrong... :)

...only joking Jaunty!

Recordings, Recordings, Recordings

When STAR was broadcasting on a Restricted Service License (RSL), recordings had to be made and kept of all audio broadcast. This works fine for short periods of time. However, we have been broadcasting online for most of a year now.

As we have been making use of the same tools for recording, we seem to be running low on disk space as none of the recordings are deleted. As detailed here, we did move some of the recordings to another machine. Unfortunately we are still running out of disk space...

There seem to be only two solutions. Get more disk space (and spend money!) or set a policy for deleting after a period of time. I've got a feeling the second one will win. Who really listens to year-old radio shows except anoraks? :)

First Post!

Well, welcome the the world of steelegbr.

As sysadmin for
WiredSoc and Head of IT/Tech at STAR I'll try to bring you updates of
keeping things ticking over and any spectacular incidents in both
areas. I might even throw in the odd rant about IT or the world in
general.

Lets start things off with today. STAR got a new
committee last week and required updates to the website and e-mail
system to cater for this. Updating the e-mail system seemed to go ok
(things don't tend to go too wrong with Google for Domains). The only
issue was me misreading a name and changing somebody's gender - oops!

The
website is where the fun started. STAR uses a bespoke system for admin
and usually works quite well. Though what was overlooked was a way to
change the committee positions on the website. It required a
combination of SQL and PHP from myself to fix. It turns out the
committee positions were hard coded into the PHP to enforce order.

Oh well, I'll get it changed (once I can remember how to update the website...).