I woke up this morning about to go to the store to get something for breakfast and decide to check out my email and also take a brief look at my site and systems.
I noticed that my Shoutcast broadcast that you use for Winamp was not connecting and said “[main] connecting to yp.shoutcast.com to remove myself [no source] “meaning it wasn’t streaming.
So I tested and basically I was using the external WAN address of my systems to start the Winamp\Shoutcast stream and that was not streaming for some reason.
When I looked at my router everything looked the same. I then decided that maybe the packets for some reason may have been going to one of my other systems ports that I had opened up for my backup music server and was still opened up. In the past I had seen this behavior tracing network packets switching back and forth between a multi-homed (two NIC’s) at an OS level when I originally started hosting my own web server at home on an HPUX system. I then had to disable the second NIC (network interface card) to prevent the packets from going from one NIC despite explicitly defining my routing tables.
Of course I have now evolved to using a Linux Web server and Windows music server to mix my music. This setup keeps the music off of my Web Server so that no one has access to download or even able to sniff the music I’m actually playing sine I use one of several DJ/broadcast programs to stream and mix the music. I can also use one of my many systems to stream my music for times when I’m updating my normal music server. I also have the same type of duplication of systems for my Linux web server.
Well back to this mornings issue it seems that the packets were going to the backup server for some reason but once I shut that port off to that system in my router everything started streaming just fine. I have however started once again providing my Shoutcast\Winamp stream from the LAN instead of the WAN as I had in the past which provides a lot less buffering anyway.
For all of you non-techies this just mean my music stream is pointing to the proper place on my Website so you can just click on the “HiFi “,”LoFi” or “ Listen using Winamp” links above and that tasty musical venom will begin flowing.

I have switched back to my normal Music Server after updating some software and updating one of the network cards to 1 GB. Now both NIC’s are 1 GB and I’m updated on my current OS patches and security fixes.
Since its night time and a full moon why not kick it off with a few mellow tunes.

This is a rarity for me doing music server maintenance during the day. I also had reconfigured my backup music server so it was not really ready to take over the full functionality of streaming the music. So I improvised and setup my portable music system to stream music temporarily.
I really forgot how much I had to do to get the music server up and running and insure it has the proper ports opened in my firewall hardware firewall to stream to Shoutcast servers and update my web server music page through the LAN.
I also had to make sure that the stream was putting out the HiFi & LoFi streams at the proper ports.
The other reason I went to my portable music system is that it had already synced up all of the music which is very CPU intensive and takes a while which is why sometimes you will hear a brief slowing of the song when I make changes to the playlist sometimes slows the song (this is why I’m looking at another way to stream music and will be implementing that sometime soon).
My backup music server I had not synced the music in a while and its still crunching the CPU performing that long task.