[Icecast] Strange occurrence

[Maarten Bezemer]

Hi,

Even excessive load shouldn't kick out clients. Although the playing of
the audiostream may become a bit shaky, it wouldn't stop completely. Or,
if it would indeed stop, it wouldn't restart without the computer being
rebooted, and for sure not restart after 10 minutes. That doesn't make any
sense.
What's more: missing interrupts and shaky playback would only eventually
get you into problems, since icecast has a large enough buffer to not kick
out clients that are several tens of seconds behind. And IF icecast kicks
out a client for being too far behind, it will mention that in the log
file.

So, I don't think this is the case here.

Did you check the Linux machines for system and/or update logs at the
given time? Maybe there was a power surge and the machines rebooted? Or
maybe a network switch was at fault? Maybe a new kernel was installed that
required a reboot? What I know of FC is that they do have kernel updates
every once in a while, and those updates naturally require a reboot.
(And, if your machine has been running for months, checking hard disks
will probably take a few minutes, 10 wouldn't be that unusual.)

The fact that icecast didn't kick out all clients at the same time, does
not indicate the clients also went "down" at different times. Icecast
"works in mysterious ways" when it comes to kicking clients.

So you better check the Linux system's log files and uptime, maybe that
can clear things up. (Also check /etc/crontab and if there's something in
/etc/cron.d that would run around 04:00...)

Regards,
 Maarten



On Thu, 7 Sep 2006, Dick Trump wrote:

> 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.