Right. Here’s what I want to do, but I am not really sure how I’m going to do it without using loads of bandwidth.

I currently have Icecast set up on a virtual server running Linux. It hosts a few broadcasts at the moment however their not permanently available. therefore, if you visit a broadcast mount point such as http://digitaldarragh.com:8000/madfortrad.m3u You will not hear anything unless someone is broadcasting to it.

The problem here is, when you advertise a broadcast like this, people like to go visit the stream right away. At the moment, when they visit it, they either get errors or their media player tries to download something. This isn’t good for very obvious reasons.

So, the problem is therefore, how do I get something to stream to this Icecast mount point all the time.

With Icecast, I can specify a secondary mountpoint. So, if I could get something to stream to this alternative mountpoint it would be perfect. Problem is, that if it’s an external source, it’s going to eat up bandwidth and also, it will likely slow the performance of the server.

So, how do I stream using a virtual server that doesn’t have a sound card and therefore obviously doesn’t have a device to stream to? Icecast needs a client to stream to it. Is there a client that would sit quietly as a service and stream to a mount point all day long? Surely this client wouldn’t work without a sound card? Or, is there some kind of virtual sound card module that I could use?

Thinking out loud, actually, the encoder / client doesn’t necessarily need to output to a sound card. and it could use a local loop back to the IceCast server. But, again, I need to make sure the client is really lightweight so it doesn’t create too much overhead in terms of memory and processor utilization because the servers priority always needs to be focused on serving websites.

Any ideas?

Problem

You cannot connect to certain sites.
You can ping IP addresses on the internet but you cant ping some or all domain names.

Background

DNS look ups are basically where you give your computer a domain name like google.com and it resolves it to an IP address such as 216.239.59.137. Generally you will have two or more DNS look up servers. These are generally given to you by your Internet Service Provider (ISP).

Solution

If your ISP is having problems with their Domain Name Servers (DNS) for short, you may want to consider using a service called OpenDNS. This service does exactly what your ISP’s DNS servers do. You will continue to have a primary and secondary DNS server but instead of looking up names using your ISP’s servers, you’ll use OpenDNS instead.

First, go to www.opendns.com and create an account. When your done, you will see instructions for adding the DNS servers to all versions of windows and Linux. If you continue down the page, you’ll also see a heading for geeks. Here, you will find the primary and secondary addresses. Keep these somewhere for a moment.

To configure Windows, Just follow these really simple steps.

1. Go to run.
2. Type the following Without the quotation marks: “control netconnections”
3. Are you using wireless to connect to the router? If so, go to Wireless network connection with your mouse / arrows. If your using a wired connection, find Local area connection..
4. press alt and enter if your using the keyboard, or right click on local area connection or wireless connection then click properties if your using a mouse.
5. If using the keyboard, press i until you land on Internet protocol TCPIP. If your using Windows 7 or Vista, you’ll see IPv4 TCPIP or something like that. If using the mouse, click on this. NOw, press alt p for properties. If your using windows 7 or vista, press alt and r. If using the mouse, click on the properties button.
6. Tab once to the radio button for obtain DNS IP address automatically and press the down arrow once to select Use the following DNS IP address. IF your using the mouse, click on this option.
7. Tab to the primary dns field or left-click on it.
8. Now, type the Primary DNS address that you got from the OpenDNS site.
9. Do the second for the secondary DNS address. Just tab to that field or click on it with the mouse.
10. When your done, click the OK button, then at the network properties, click close.

Right, that’s the hard bit done. Now, you just need to flush your DNS cache.

Your DNS cache is a local log of addresses that have been looked up. This cache reduces the amount of look ups that are carried out. However, when your change your DNS server due to problems, you need to remove this cache so that at the start, all further look ups are sent out to the primary or secondary DNS servers.

Doing this is really simple.

1. Go to run.
2. Type “cmd” and hit enter or click ok.
3. In the resulting command prompt window, type the following without the quotations: “ipconfig /flushdns” and hit the enter key.
4. Now, type exit.

Your done.

Close any and all Internet Explorer windows open at the moment and try going back to a site you previously couldn’t access.

Ok. It’s no secret.

If your a boards.ie member, go on over to their website as there’s an important message for everyone who has an account there.

I really pity them. This is going to be a hard mess to clean up after. And it’s really not their fault either!

www.boards.ie

I decided on Sunday that I was going to set up a service on a Linux box for streaming audio. It’s not for me… not for the moment anyway. It’s for Stuart Lawler He wanted to stream his weekly podcast, the Stuart Lawler Show live to listeners while also making it available as a downloadable podcast. He’s planning to air it every week at 2PM. So, if your around at that time which is 7AM in Canada and 9AM in most parts of the US, Hop on over to The live show feed. Note, that feed doesn’t work when he’s not broadcasting so be warned, it will probably just give you a page not found error message.

I wanted to write a few notes to explain the process that I used to get IceCast running on this Ubuntu 8.04 machine. Firstly, I made a mistake. I didn’t realise the Icecast2 package was available in the apt repositories. So, I compiled all of the dependencies and the actuall Icecast package my self from source. So, I could have made it much easier on my self if I had checked the repositories before hand but… hay, that’s life.

So, when installing Icecast from source, you’ll need to download, configure, make and install LibXML, LibXXLT, LibTool, Curl and make. You’ll also need libvorbis, libogg and possibly a few other packages depending on what your doing.
You should install your dependencies in that order before moving on to IceCast as the make clean option didn’t work after the make process failed due to dependency problems.

Of course, if your compiling Icecast from source, you’ll need to add it as a service to run so you’ll need to grab or manually create a file to run it for /etc/init.d/

But, that isn’t probably necessary if you bother to check the package repository first though.

simply, go and grab it by typing sudo apt-get install icecast2 and your done. Don’t do what I also stupidly did when I installed icecast-server as that is version 1 of the package. Why they still have that in the repository I will never know.

Right. Is that done?

The config files are in /etc/icecast2.

Hay, I noticed a little funny thing when I installed it. I created a group called icecast with limited access and then a user with a similar name. Then, the installer created a new group… But what wsa funny was that in the config it generated in /etc/icecast2/icecast.xml, it elft the last bit commented out where the user name and the group is specified for better security. Something must have been left out somewhere when the package was created for the Ubuntu repositories. anyway, it’s simple enough to customise the xml file. The only problem is figuring out what addesses it’s looking for. The howtos, forums and every other bit of documentation out there is confusion at it’s best. Forget it all! Just use the release notes and the comments in the config file to guide you because they won’t stear you wrong.

Change the hostname to yourdomain.com.
Leave the port.
uncomment the changeowner part of the config at the bottom. comments start with . If your reading this with a screen reader, that last bit will make no sense to you. Use your read by character functions to see it.

Finally, when that’s done, create your mount point. At this stage, look at the sample mount points in the config. Only take what you need from them. Start the block with , end it with and you’ll be fine. The only information it really needs is the tag. Make that /name.mp3 or something like that.

That’s all there is too it really. It’s really much easier than I thought it was going to be. Actually, by complicating it, I probably made it more difficult than it needed to be.