Berkman Meeting - Tuesday 10 Feb 2004 20:00 UTC #meeting irc.indymedia.org

see also BerkmanMeetingLog20040210

Prior Information

Current configuration

Berkman runs FreeBSD 4.9-STABLE. Kernel is "BERKMAN-2". We've an amazing number of software packages installed, a number of them being broken because of dynamic libs version mismatch (this is the result of port-upgrade). This is not too horrible because hopefully most packages will be moved to jails.

Two jails are currently setup and running/ready to run in "/home/JAILS/", they're documented a bit more in "/home/JAILS/READMEs/".

• Jail-a: listening 213.130.163.9, plan is to run there public services, most notably HTTPD and Icecast. Seems that Occam has an Icecast running there and listening port 8003; Access it doing "sudo ssh jail-a".

• Jail-local: listens 127.0.0.8, is currently down cuz useless, plan is to run there PostgreSQL and MySQL if needed (they are installed in the host and running, so maybe they're used). You can't access it, it's down.

Installed packages

Here's a the list of (relevant or unknown to me) packages installed on Berkman, on the main system and in the two jails. It would be nice to clarify their usage (say: who uses ruby, MySQL, etc.).

B=broken, U=useless, src=from sources.

Package	Berkman (default: Yes)	jail-a (default: no)	jail-local (default: no)
Sablot-1.0		y
XFree86-libraries-4.3.0_6	This is silly
apache-2.0.48_3		y
electricfence-2.2.2
expat-1.95.6_1		Y
flac-1.1.0_3
freetype2-2.1.5_1
gettext-0.13.1		Y
gtk-1.2.10_9
icecast2-2.*	src	Y
jpeg-6b_1
lame-3.95.1
libao-0.8.4_1
libgnugetopt-1.2		Y
libid3tag-0.15.0b_1
libmad-0.15.0b
libogg-1.1,3		Y
libshout2-2.0_1.1	N	Y
libvorbis-1.0.1,3		Y
libxml2-2.6.5		Y
libxslt-1.1.2_2		Y
linux_base-7.1_1	BU
mad-0.14.2b_2	B
mod_php4-4.3.4,1		Y
mod_python-3.0.3
mpg321-0.2.10_4
mysql-client-4.0.17		Y	4.1.0_1
mysql-server-4.0.17			4.1.0_1
opengk-1.3.3
openldap-client-2.1.26		Y
openmcu-1.1.7
phpMyAdmin-2.3.2	B
postfix-2.0.18,1	U?
postgresql-7.2.4_2
postgresql-7.3.4_1	B		Y
postgresql-client-7.3.4_1		Y
py-MySQLdb-0.9.2
py23-ogg-1.3_1
py23-vorbis-1.3_1
python-2.3.3		Y
ruby-1.6.8.2003.10.15
ruby-bdb1-0.2.1
ruby-shim-ruby18-1.8.1.p3
sox-12.17.3_1	B
tcl-8.4.5,1
unzip-5.50_2
vorbis-tools-1.0_1,3	B
xmlcatmgr-2.0.b1

Additional Discussion Points

What the box is used for.

The box is used for, among other things, U.S. west coast indymedia net radio listener bandwidth. nathaniel t

what software have to be setup;

We have been using icecast2. There was also an attempt to have a “common global” radio station running all the time that involved python and a database that only three people really understood. It might be helpful to in addition have shoutcast service available -- in addition, not instead -- since many indymedia audio people and pirate radio people still seem to use shoutcast rather than icecast, for whatever reason. Specific arguments for and against shoutcast are well known and [...]

Okay, I guess they’re not well known.

Some Arguments For: Shoutcast is what most mainstream people use. It’s actually what most indymedia and pirate radio people use. Some people who use it are of the opinion that it’s “more stable” than oddcast/icecast (Portland IMC Web Radio is still using shoutcast for this reason). Shoutcast streams start up for listeners quicker than icecast streams.

Some Arguments Against: Although freely available, shoutcast is not Open Source. It's a project of nullsoft, which is now owned by AOL. Shoutcast doesn’t support ogg vorbis. It doesn’t support custom yellow-pages directories. It doesn’t support multiple sources or bitrates without admins running separate instances of the server application on different ports. nathaniel t

-- JiBe - 04 Feb 2004
-- PietroFerrari - 04 Feb 2004
-- EarthmanWhyTheFsckCantThisHandleSingleNames - 10 Feb 2004
-- NathanielT - 13 Feb 2004