I had something happen the other night that I just can't explain. It may not be an Icecast issue at all, but I thought it was interesting enough to post. I have a private stream with 6 mountpoints, all receiving the same 32 kbps mp3 stream from Simplecast. Both Simplecast & Icecast are running on the same Win2k system. The configuration allows me to track the comings and goings of individual client machines. Five of the mountpoints each have Linux clients running a script that automatically reconnects them if the stream is lost for some reason. Several of these have run for over a year without any intervention. Reconnections happen regularly for various reasons but are virtually 100% reliable in reconnecting. One of the clients is a monitor system running the same LAN as the server. All other clients are distributed among other ISP connections across my state. The 6th mount point has 3 clients, 2 of which are using WinAmp with a custom program that I wrote that also automatically reconnects the client if the connection is lost. I'm unsure of the client software on the 3rd machine. I suspect it is WMP. It does not reconnect reliably. Here's the mystery: At 4:00am Monday morning, all Linux clients, including the one on the LAN dropped out within a minute of each other for about 10 minutes. Each of them reconnected as expected, all within a minute of each other. The three Windows clients played through this period with no interruption. Go figure! In monitoring this system for a year and a half, I have never seen anything like it. I don't really expect anybody to be able to explain this, but thought I'd post it just in case. -- Dick dtrump1@triadav.com
Hi Dick, I suspect the Linux systems are running a nightly or weekly cron job they weren't running before causing an excessive load on CPU or network which caused the clients to disconnect. The nightly cron jobs are generally located in /etc/cron.daily and run a 4am!. Check for any changes in the nightly cron jobs. Hope this helps. Regards, KJ Dick Trump schreef:> I had something happen the other night that I just can't explain. It may not be an Icecast issue at all, but I thought it was interesting enough to post. > > I have a private stream with 6 mountpoints, all receiving the same 32 kbps mp3 stream from Simplecast. Both Simplecast & Icecast are running on the same Win2k system. The configuration allows me to track the comings and goings of individual client machines. > > Five of the mountpoints each have Linux clients running a script that automatically reconnects them if the stream is lost for some reason. Several of these have run for over a year without any intervention. Reconnections happen regularly for various reasons but are virtually 100% reliable in reconnecting. One of the clients is a monitor system running the same LAN as the server. All other clients are distributed among other ISP connections across my state. > > The 6th mount point has 3 clients, 2 of which are using WinAmp with a custom program that I wrote that also automatically reconnects the client if the connection is lost. I'm unsure of the client software on the 3rd machine. I suspect it is WMP. It does not reconnect reliably. > > Here's the mystery: > > At 4:00am Monday morning, all Linux clients, including the one on the LAN dropped out within a minute of each other for about 10 minutes. Each of them reconnected as expected, all within a minute of each other. > > The three Windows clients played through this period with no interruption. Go figure! > > In monitoring this system for a year and a half, I have never seen anything like it. > > I don't really expect anybody to be able to explain this, but thought I'd post it just in case. > >
Klaas Jan Wierenga wrote:> I suspect the Linux systems are running a nightly or weekly cron job > they weren't running before causing an excessive load on CPU or network > which caused the clients to disconnect. The nightly cron jobs are > generally located in /etc/cron.daily and run a 4am!. Check for any > changes in the nightly cron jobs.Thanks. I didn't know that 4 am was magic but had suspected it might be a cron job. Nothing would have been added recently. These have been in place varying lengths of time but are pretty much clones of each other with a little remote maintenance done on the first ones installed. But nothing has changed within the past 8-10 months. The only cron.daily that I put in was to do an rdate time synchronization with time-b.nist.gov. That's been in place since the beginning. But there were some default ones that are there from the initial FC1 installation. Maybe a yum or rpm? In any case, knowing the 4:00am magic time lets me know that it had nothing to do with Icecast. -- Regards Dick Trump Triad AV Services 1910 Ingersoll Ave. Des Moines, IA 50309 515-243-2125 515-243-2055 (fax) http://www.triadav.com dtrump1@triadav.com