www.TheJoe.com

With the recent release of Mac OSX 10.5 (Leopard) and my current frustrations with Vista,  I have decided to take a look at the Mac platform for my production work.

Yes yes, I know that I have been blogging about Linux and it’s variants, but for what I do, I need something that I don’t have to fuss around with much.  I need to be able to edit video and audio.  I need it to “just work”.   Linux is making great strides in multimedia, but from my perspective, there is still too much configuration required to make it work the way I want it to.

Moving forward, I have decided to try OSX out on a “hackintosh” BEFORE I spend real money on Apple hardware. (again, I know this is oxymoronic considering what I said in my last paragraph, but I don’t mind playing with the OS first then getting the hardware properly)  

With all that said, I decided to see if I can get Leopard running on one of my test machines.  Specifically, one of my Toshiba laptops with an AMD processor.  Since I do not trust downloaded software for the most part, I decided to buy a legitimate copy of Leopard to work with.  I figure, if all doesn’t work well for me, I can sell it.  (normally, I would just buy a Mac, but I can’t float the 2,000 for the time being - besides, 150 bux is better than 2k to try it out)  

For yet another piece of irony, from my research so far, I need to have a running copy of 10.4.x to get the AMD patches onto a Leopard install DVD.  (I had to download a copy of this - LOL)  It’s just temporary, but it’s funny to me none the less. 

I am in the process of doing the 10.4.x install now and was bored during the wait so I decided to do this post.  I will post the details of the install if all goes well.

For a long time now, I have wanted to run an Internet radio station.  Since I have been back in Entropia Universe, I have been hanging out on Club Neverdie a lot.  They have a live music stream that goes into the virtual world.  

Recently, they opened their stream for rental.  This interested me, so I am going to rent the stream during an event I will be hosting on Club Neverdie.  I found out they use SAM Broadcaster and Windows Media Services for their stream.  I’ve been a user SAM Broadcaster for a bit, but it was always one of those things that got pushed aside for other projects. I decided to take another look and set up some stuff with my servers.

First off, I set up one of my servers in my Data-center as a streaming audio server.  For this, I used the Icecast2 server for Linux.  Fairly straight forward set-up.  I installed Centos 5, then did an install of Icecast and edited the config files to the settings I liked.

I then installed SAM Broadcaster on one of my laptops and plugged in one of my portable HD’s with a copy of my MP3 collection and had SAM catalog it.  This too was fairly straightforward.  After the install and cataloging of my mp3’s, I set up a stream to my Icecast2 server and I was broadcasting on the Internet.  Good stuff.

This config is all fine and dandy for most people that just want to broadcast occaisionally.  For people that require constant or continuous 24/7 streams, I saw a slight flaw, your internet connection would be constantly used in sending the broadcast out to the server.  So, I came up with a plan.  Read on…

Read the complete Post.

For some time now, I had been migrating data and stuff off of our large server at the data-center.  It had a couple failing drives and I was going to have the company re-do the machine.  To prepare for this, several months ago, we moved most of the sites off that box.  One of these was the Order of Z guild website.  (a guild I run that covers several games and is many years old)

In the migration process (a few months back)  I had issues with the database transfer, so I kept the pointer and old database running to the old box.  Now, normally I am very careful about taking notes and notating what I have done with what.  For some reason, I did not flag this in my server configuration notes that I keep.

Fast forward to present day,  a couple weeks ago, I started disabling services on the box to be re-done.  I double checked everything.  This machine had several virtual machines running on it, and I turned each down one at a time and waited a day before proceeding. (to ensure no customer/client services were not interrupted) I did do the double check on the host server (which was also the main DB server).  I saw the OZ database and just assumed that it was the old one. (part of the reason for this was that I had created the new DB on the new box, when I was attempting transfer, it had data so I assumed it was being used)

So, I flag the support team and let them know that that box is ready for re-doing.  They confirm with me that it will loose all it’s data.  I say “Yep! Go for it!”.

About four hours later.  I go to the Order of Z site, I get this error message.  Long story short, I figure we got hacked.  NOPE,  I had them wipe the database remember!  DOH! 

Anyways, I do have a few back ups, I will be looking through them to see which is the most recent.  I will get the site back up and running.   I will probably take the time this time to do some of the upgrades I wanted to do.

 In the mean time, the teamspeak server is still up.  I am still working on my new guild in Entropia Universe, www.zoku.euyou guys are all welcome to come join us. (Janu and Thor have been in-game)  We have some interesting people, you guys are also welcome to join the forum if you miss shooting the shit.

If you’re an Order of Z member and have any thoughts on the matter, please comment.