New Hardware

With my daily commute to St. Andrews by bus, I decided to purchase myself a cheep laptop to do small amounts of work on the move (always a good thing close to deadlines).

I decided to go for an Advent unit sporting a dual core processor and 1Gb RAM. Pre-loaded with Vista of course. So the first thing I do is attempt to install Ubuntu (dual boot).

Ubuntu doesn't even boot. Turns out I've got to disable ACPI support in the boot options. So no battery monitoring (though the machine is nice enough to beep and flash at you at low battery) and the system runs at full pelt all the time.

Not really major issues. The one thing I spent ages getting to work was wireless support. The machine uses a Realtek RTL8189 chip. Not supported by default (though will be in the next version of Ubuntu!) and requiring the download of a leaked and patched driver it was not what I would class as fun. Also, I couldn't just use the Windows drivers as they don't work with ndiswrapper.

Ah well, it's working on my home network just now (WEP for various reasons). The real test will be Eduroam (WPA2-Enterprise) with much mucking about with wpa_supplicant.

Though, while on the topic of Eduroam, I'm rather thankful that an access point has now been installed in the top floor of the union. Very useful when I'm there all week.

UPDATE:

I've managed to get rid of the crash on the "processor device is not present" message. Using nohz=off in the boot options allows the boot to continue and I get a battery meter!

Live and On-Air

STAR is now well into the one week broadcast over Orientation week. The idea of this broadcast being to entice people to join STAR (thus the press tour as well - we're even going to Albany Park).

However, launch has not been without it's problems. For example, our streaming machine (studio6) just seemed to "die" the night before. So we get to the studio to find the machine has had a hardware failure (probably disk controller). Not good 1hr to launch! Kieran and myself got one of our little used machines (studio3) setup to handle streaming. The saviour that is NFS home directories saved us having to redo the settings file.

Also, we are now operating with new microphones in the studio. We're still trying to get the compressor settings right on that one. We've either got people *way* too loud (distortion) or people speaking too quietly, which keeps cutting out the mic (we've got a lower limit set to eliminate background noise). My plan is to go fix that later today.

On a plus side, Kieran has setup MRTG to give us accurate listener figures and pretty graphs. I'll probably post those after the broadcast has finished. So, as the DJs say - "stay tuned for that one".

Oh, and just before I forget. There are rumours that STAR will be attending the Christmas lights switch-on in St. Andrews. This should be an interesting event. And as ever, we've got STAR's music festival thingy to come as well.

Studio Nearly Read To Go LIVE

Kieran (our ITS contact / starfm server admin) and myself have spent a fair amount of today sorting out the STAR studio in order to go on air on Monday. We've made a bit of a major change to the studio in that we no loger span two rooms. This works out much better for those on-air with less possibility of interruption.

Secondly, we've installed the new microphones and stands. We're now actually using broadcast mics and angelpoise stands. Less noise and better quailty than what we used to have.

Thirdly, we're reassigning some of the machines. The current music server is to loose this service to the playout system locally. However this change will NOT be made until after the Orientation broadcast. What will change is this machine will be used for web browsing / e-mail. That is what I will be spending tomorrow sorting out.

Ah well, after all this effort, we should sound much better.

Oh, I might actually take some pics for you lonely anoraks when I'm their tomorrow.

Technical Blunders for the Win!

Sunday saw me starting my new job as out of hours staff for one of the UK's major electrical retailers. It's not a bad job really and there's no real thinking to it. However, I just received an email today from the recruitment team stating:

"I regret to inform you that we won't be progressing your application any further on this occasion."

WTF? I've just been employed and get told I will not be getting employed. Go figure!

We Go Back A Step

It's been decided that STAR will be making use of the old website over Orientation Week (the official name for freshers week). So it's a lot of work down the pan for now, but I've pulled the source out of version control to find... blatant opportunities for SQL injection. There were a lot of pages with code similar to:

$id = $_GET['id'];
$sql = "SELECT * FROM table WHERE id = " . $id;

Not wanting to be the one cleaning up the database after somebody has attacked I've changed these to use parameterized statements.

I've also taken the opportunity to remove some hard-coded database values. This is in relation to the committee page. In the old version, the position names are in an array and a "printperson" type method is called for each position. I've edited this to make one call the the
"printperson" method that displays all the positions. This way, future edits need only be made to the database.

In other STAR software news, the playout system seems a bit more stable. However, the system will just stop making sound after a random period of time. This does not seem connected to the playout system as it reports as still playing (the javasound calls are still being made and reporting successful) and restarting the system doesn't clear the error... weird.

Anyway, I've got to go and tell people about our busted speaker, missing headphones and organize getting some holes drilled.

Power Goes Out... So Does wired

So, I come to St. Andrews to sort a few things out only to find a power cut when I turn up. Hmm... puts a bit of a dampener on things. Anyway, power comes back on, wired remains offline. Turns out there is a number of issues causing boot to fail (on the VM not the host). After much work from Kieran it is operational again let's hope it stays that way.

Getting Ready To Go LIVE

Only a few weeks now until STAR goes live. That means things have kicked off a bit in pace. We've got a number of jobs to do including prepping the studio to go on-air (this includes installing some new kit).

However, we have run into a few problems. Currently the Media Suite (where STAR is located) has a tiled floor. This means every chair movement can be heard on air - not good. We've asked Estates about some carpet to put in the studio. Turns out it's not the first time STAR has asked and the answer is NO due to the union' s stance. I guess we have to play nice on this one and put up with tiled flooring for now.

Changes Across The Board

We've had a few teething problems with out Xen based server system. We kept running into an issue where the server "pauses" for an indefinite period of time then resumes as if nothing had happened. As the system never actually crashed, there was no information in any of the logs.

Upgrading the Xen version did not fix the problem. So, we've simplified things a bit. This allows us to get a server up and providing services.

We no longer use Xen for virtualisation (though we may use it in a VM in the future). We now use KVM / Qemu. The plan is to have one VM as the main (live) system. This is backed up using LVM snapshots. The main VM "talks" to the host system holding all of the data.

Eventually further VMs will be created including Dev (testing, etc) and *possibly* a VM running Xen. Why? Well, it allows us to create more VMs in a controlled environment for users, etc.

Anyhow, service should be resumed as normal now.