Rob thanks for your post. My two cents on the hardware: I recently purchased
an HP Proliant DL 380 G4 / two - dual core Xeons, 4gb ram then set it up with
raid five all under $100.00 through Craigslist. Like you say everything has
its price and I ran into the same hardware limitations with Centos and Opensuse
(SLES 10.x ran great and is still supported by Novell but no RDD compatibility)
, but in this case my last ditch effort was the Debian 7 64 bit Wheezy which
installed and runs great now for about a month, RDD also installed smoothl, so
the big picture remains that installation of Rivendell is no longer my main
thorn in my side, but the streaming chain: Jack / Encoder / Icecast. When the
latter gets talking reliably the system will rock. The dual Xeon's means 4
cores so it has plenty of bw to put out a good quality stream to folks.
Coming from an IT background more than terresterial broadcasting, looking
forward is that the industry is moving toward mobile devices, that means
streaming services are essential, where they were previously a novelty in any
business model just a few years ago. As media people we will either learn to
change with the times or go extinct. Many newspapers have learned a hard
lesson.
In the big pic the fast moving revisions of the Linux freeware seems to be a
deal breaker with many RDD installations. Just my perspective... if the RDD
developer folk in general were to centralize on a platform like RHE or Suse
Linux Enterprise Server - SLES with a longer life span would resolve to a more
stable platform with greater support. I believe it is doable but being just
one person I know there are other folk who can do some things more efficiently
than me. Trying to learn and support the different flavors of Linux is
sizeable overhead with another price to pay. Not trying to be obtuse here in
any way just looking for stable platform, long life span with the goal of
getting the Word out through the media which is our job roles and our end goal.
All the posts are appreciated.
Gary
>________________________________
> From: Rob Landry <41001...@interpring.com>
>To: G Wood <glw...@avnetmedia.net>
>Cc: User discussion about the Rivendell Radio Automation System
><rivendell-dev@lists.rivendellaudio.org>
>Sent: Monday, July 8, 2013 8:46 AM
>Subject: Re: [RDD] arrrrgh!!! % # -- CentOS and Rivendell: and a feature
>request
>
>
>
>
>On Sun, 7 Jul 2013, G Wood wrote:
>
>> Your post Fred is helpful. I found this post from the past and thought
>> I'd try to resurrect it. I am curious about the RDD Broadcast
>> Appliance, I have downloaded it several times from the Paravel site but
>> have encountered repeated corrupt installs, errors referring to a
>> kernel panic and other low level errrors & delays of modules loading.
>
>Like everything in the Linux world, I have found that the Appliance is
>somewhat hardware-dependent. I built a machine recently around a new
>motherboard and found that while the Appliance would install and run, it
>would not talk to the ASI5111 sound card properly. Switching to Debian 6
>and compiling the asihpi driver from source proved to work. But another
>new machine required CentOS 6. Debian 6 and CentOS 5 would not recognize
>the NIC or the hard drive controller. Debian 7 didn't have QT3, which
>Rivendell requires, until it became available via Tryphon.
>
>I built one machine (on old hardware) using the Tryphon packages, and
>another (also on old hardware) with the Appliance; both worked flawlessly,
>however, for my newest machine neither approach would work, and I ended up
>compiling Rivendell from source.
>
>While there is such a thing as free software, and it often (as in the case
>of Rivendell) outshines its commercial rivals, there is no such thing as a
>free lunch. You generally have to spend either time or money. If you can
>afford it, you have the option of buying Rivendell machines from Paravel;
>they won't be free, but they'll be a lot less expensive than what some of
>my clients have paid for automation systems from other vendors.
>
>> Since our media efforts are all on line, streaming is essential, no
>> longer a nice option. The broken parts in that chain (other than
>> Rivendell) has left us off the air for extended times.
>
>A streaming encoder is really just another transmitter. It usually needs
>to be a separate machine from the automation system, fed via its own
>processing chain, like any transmitter. While I want to experiment with
>JACK and running a stream from a Rivendell box, that approach is not
>suitable for stations that are not fed 100% from Rivendell. One of my
>clients has a live mic on the air at least 50% of the time, and Rivendell
>only plays a few minutes out of most hours.
>
>
>Rob
>
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>
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