1) Suicide Servers
As a rather large number of you found out around 4:10 PM today, our Windows Media server at Limelight Networks, died during Episode 56. A couple of gentle souls that stuck around (or tuned in late) tell me it popped back up around 4:50, just in time for last of the show to scoot by on screen. That sucks. Not the server coming back up, but the outage. I'd like to apologize for that.
I'd also like to let you know what happened. Whether it was server suicide (really, the show was pretty good, so I don't think our stream drove it over the edge), somebody tripping over the power cord, some nameless WM glitch, an attack, or what. But we don't know. I've just gotten of the phone with Limelight after a series of emails under the "um, we're getting a rather large number of posts and emails that said our stream died... what happened?"
The folks that answer the phone don't know. They're 'waiting for an RFO... that'll be available sometime later tonight.' That's NOC-speak for Reason For Outage... NOC being a Network Operations Center. (I love Acronym Finder!) As soon as we know, we'll let you know. Hopefully it's something massively cool, like 40 zillion folks jumped on the server and killed it. That's about the only happy reason I can think of for our live audience getting hosed.
[[Update 7:30PM: It wasn't something cool. It was "due to faulty handling of stream updates in the operating system. This caused the streams in several locations to fail to update." More later. Upate 8:45: Short version: it won't happen again. Longer version? Windows isn't UNIX, especially when a bad process goes berserk. A bad stream took out 220 Windows Server boxes.]]
2) Forum Lust We're dumping
Telligent's CommunityServer (the software that DL.TV runs on)
[[Note 05/05/06: On behalf of our dev team, I'd like to point out that Ziff Davis Media uses CS for forums on PCMag.com and ExtremeTech.com, "which is the reason we choose them (not for blogs) and that's been trouble free" and that "We're happy with Telligent as used in the PCMag.com Discussion forums. It's been a big step up from our previous system." In short, the only group here at Ziff that's frustrated with CommunityServer are the folks using it as a straight blogging tool: DL.TV and CrankyGeeks.com.]] shortly for something that doesn't a) cost a fortune every time you want to update the software or tweak the look of the site (I supposed it's cheap if you have a large in-house team of developers), b) doesn't do horrid things like randomly clip OBJECT tags for no apparent reason, or smersh up basic HTML formatting and c) a whole list of other reasons .
If anybody reading is considering dropping a check on
CommunityServer, free free to kick us an email. I'd love to talk to you before you do.
[[Note 05/05/06: I'm sure our dev team would also be more than willing to share their success stories using CS for the forums on PCMag and ExtremeTech... CS carries a pretty heavy load there with aplomb.]]Did I mention forums? We need to get the site where we want it before we start building forums. We know you want them. We'd like to give 'em to you. At the moment, we don't have the bandwidth to set 'em up. (Tho, hey, Robert and I might go nuts one weekend and see what we can build in
Drupal.
[[Note 05/05/06: this was a bit of a jest on my part, but thanks to the Drupal mavins that emailed in!]])But forums are something we'd love to give ya'll, so, yes, they are very much on the radar.
3) The Downloads For Episode 56Will be available Friday. Don't worry about the server dying... the tape was still rolling. We're busy encoding and will have the files up Friday, assuming the anger over the server problems doesn't gnaw at me till the wee small hours when the rendering finishes up. If it does, DL.TV Episode 56 will be available sometime in the wee small hours Friday morning.
4) In the meantime...Feel free to kick on over to
CrankyGeeks.com and check out Episode 7... Robert Heron's on there with Dvorak, Loyd Case and John Johnson and the whole crew is talking about HDTV, HD-DVD and Blu-ray.
5) Again,My apologies for the live stream going down.
Patrick
320x240 H.264
320x240
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