Last night i logged into WGKA at 9pm and found that Liquid Compass from their radio station was down.
I logged onto the radio show through “Blog TV” and through “Chat” alerted the host and “manager” of the situation.
They fumbled around over that and then the manager (not sure what position he actually holds) asked me what “Liquid Compass” was. After the immediate on air announcement that “it must be Jim’s computer” They then tried to bring up the stream and (of course) failed. The manager then asked me what Liquid Compass *was*. I explained that it was their stream provider but thought it interesting that the manager really knew so little. (The host I could understand not knowing.)
i had 2 of my favorite stations from Salem Radio last week that wouldn’t stream for about 24 hours, and they had a liquid compass url, so i think they(LC) might be having some trouble…
LiquidCompass had a problem that the DNS for their streaming server was missing, so you got a server not found error. DNS things are very tricky, because the information is cached in the server at the Internet Provider – unless you’re using an ISP with the bad DNS info or you have people who know enough (like me) clue you in on what the problem is, the main symptom they would have noticed was a drastic dropoff in listeners, and vague complaints…. I wrote support@ to explain their problem to them, but didn’t hear back from them… Salem and Saga are their main clients.
that sounds right…my little radio program gets that error quite a bit so i wasn’t sure if i had a connection problem or not and then i couldn’t get KTKZ for several hours so i thought the problem was theirs, then i noticed KRLA wouldn’t work either….
why would that happen – HDD error, data corrupted? or a hacker….
they must not make any money off streaming or else it prob would have been fixed sooner….
It was a widespread problem – when you started having the problem depends on how long your ISP caches DNS responses… AT&T, Comcast and Cox Cable were definitely affected – the SRGuide web server was not.
The most two likely reasons were that the “authoritative server” for their DNS fell offline or a router somewhere was blocking attempts to access the server so when the local cached entry at your ISP expired, your computer went back to the authortative server – and that was getting timeouts….
I heard 3rd hand type information that some people were let go on the prior Friday, so that may have been related. I don’t think it was anything sinister, just a combination of not realizing they had a problem, and maybe not knowing right away how to fix it.
jfd445, what really surprised me is that, as I saw, they do not keep up with whether the stream is streaming or not. If I am paying for a service (such as that) I do believe that I would be making random or auto checks or monitoring to see that the service i was paying for was actually occurring.
Art, thinking on your DNS comments, I suppose that the minimal information of “Connecting” that LC initially gives is inclusive of ‘locating server’ and never really gets deeper than that, until if finally says “Connection closed” which is probably indicative that it never located the server in the first place — unless it goes to “buffering and then “Now playing” which indicates success . IOW, there was no “connecting” involved. (Considering in order to “connect” the server must exist in the DNS world). Last night the host at the initial program start asked if they were streaming. All i could think was this is not exactly rocket science. He has at least two computers in front of him and the streaming can be checked with audio muted. (I know that because of the blog-tv streaming of video where I see him respond to chat and also look things up on the web with a search engine during the show.) But hey, everyone has their job. :-)
BTW, Art, you lost me on “authoritative server” unless you are referring to the Primary DNS server and in the case you outline there is no Secondary DNS server.