A podcast by Robert Menes and Troels Pleimert
Well, that was a fun romp! Our old server decided to keel over and die in the most horrific way possible, forcing a new droplet to be spun up and everything we had rescued from the old server into a new one!
Continue reading New server! Because the old one caught fire!
So it looks like we had a little hiccup earlier when Troels uploaded Episode 5: I noticed that I couldn’t stream the episode, nor could I download it. “File not found”, the site said. Wait… how’s that possible!?
So I wondered if perhaps there was a problem with the filename. All of the episodes to date are named following the pattern “NATM_epX.mp3”, which means consistent across the board.
Time to hop into the server to see what’s up with this weirdness.
What’s the first thing I see when I get to the folder containing all of our precious podcast booty?
Ahh! There’s the problem! In Linux and all Unixen, files can have unique names even if you name it in ALL CAPS. So you can have HELLOTHERE.jpg and hellothere.JPG, and they’re two completely unique files as far as the OS cares! We need to change that natm_ep5.mp3 into:
Because the stream was explicitly pointing to NATM_ep5.mp3! Now it works!
Sysadmin saves the day again! 😀
Hello, howdy, good day to you all, and whatever you like to greet others with! Robert here, sticking his head out from his cave where he takes care of all the nice little back-end stuff that keeps this lovely little site shoved all up into someone’s cloud running! I just wanted to give you all a little behind the scenes look as to what this site is running on, and what it takes to keep it running.
For starters, this site is of course running on WordPress, running on a cloud server running Ubuntu 16.04 (because penguins, dammit!) Hosting for our little site is provided by those awesome, awesome folks at Digital Ocean, and the hosting is in NYC, just a stone’s throw from me!
As I’m a sysadmin and engineer by nature, I’m the one who basically makes sure that the site doesn’t go kaputsky on us in the middle of the night or something drastic like that. 🙂
But that’s just a nice little look into what we’re using to run this site. Troels does the front-end (makes it look nice); I keep the engine running in the back-end. An excellent combo, no?
Two nerds meet on Twitter.
They talk about movies, computers, old adventure games, and other general nerdy topics.
Then they think, “Hey, what if we share our thoughts about these sorts of things with the rest of the internet? You know, in the form of a podcast?”
This is their story…