Sound to Light Christmas
Pop into most radio stations and you’ll soon see Christmas decorations going up in the offices and studios. In most cases, it’ll be some lights, tinsel and maybe even the odd electronic reindeer in...
D/Line Radio Blog
Shared Nothing Hyper-V Infrastructure
The “standard” way to build a VM farm involves centralised storage, usually some form of SAN, with a number of compute nodes. The result is an infrastructure that looks something like this: I’ll admit...
WDS for Windows and Linux
Where I work is very much a Windows shop. Well, there’s also almost 2000 OS X laptops to worry about. However, most of the infrastructure we operate is built around Windows. Active Directory provides...
Playing the Music You Want to Hear
I once heard someone say that there are two things in volunteer radio stations that can cause big arguments – jingles and music. While I do believe that’s somewhat unfair, experience tells me music...
Calling in the Foreman
For what feels like a really long time now, configuration management systems such as Puppet have been the norm. Even in a small charity I do work for I’ve had it deployed for managing...
Low Power DAB Multiplex
In case you’ve not noticed, we recently saw the first trial low power DAB multiplex launch in Brighton. It’s part of a nine month technical trial covering three possible technical options. The first of...
Getting the Right Sound
You’ve just gone out and bought a shiny new audio processor for your radio station. It may have every feature under the sun, but you’ll still need the same techniques and knowledge used on...
Patch Management in the Linux World
At one radio station I volunteer for, we’re mainly a Linux shop. Rivendell provide playout, Icecast streams the audio and it’s Debian on the desktop. With the small number of systems involved, keeping them...
It’s Getting Meta in My Router
Virtualisation has really taken over the world of IT. In the day job, I don’t buy new servers, I ask for a VM to be provisioned on an existing VM cluster. Even in the...
Protecting that Web Stream with QoS on Cisco ADSL Routers
If you’ve got a broadcast critical web stream to worry about, prioritising it ahead of all other web traffic is an important job. I’ve seen a number of approaches to it over the years. The...