OAS Playout Hastings Rock

Trial Log - May 2002

Installation.....

This is the fun bit of course where stuff starts going in and you can play with it all. We started moving the kit up there in mid April to get it all running, let everyone have a go on it and make any changes necessary.

Can't go much further without mentioning that for reasons best known to myself I tend to give computers obscure names and no exception here. The music server I called "toaster" which got noticed early on during the "restoring network connections to toaster" dialog which kept popping up. This led to various surreal phone conversations along the lines of:

" how do you switch the toaster off?" and

"i've left the toaster on, is that all right?"

since all the toaster has to do is serve out music, it doesn't have to be a particularly high spec machine - it's an old P120 HP Vectra machine which I got hold off for about £50 recently. It's got some interesting design features I found out when trying to fit the removable drive carrier, notably the standard 5.25" drive bay being a not quite so standard 6" drive bay...

no it's not just wedged in there either - it's amazing what you can do with a set of B&Q shelf brackets.

The toaster runs an operating system called Linux - this is a completely different beast to Windows and somewhat harder to set up. However Linux provides a very reliable and stable platform and is particularly designed for operating as a server - it has a reputation of being able to run unattended for months even years without problems. It can also happily access Windows format disks (so we could plug the removable drive straight into it) and appear as a standard Windows PC to other machines on the network.

Hastings Rock - broadcast studio

Hastings Rock 'studios' are above a pub - The Robert De Mortain on the ridge in Hastings and let's be honest, any venue above a pub has to be a Good Thing. The height over the town also gives it good transmission coverage.

There's a fair bit of space upstairs - the largest room is dedicated to the main on-air studio, with the toaster & network hub located in the small kitchen adjacent to it - where else would you put a toaster after all?

One of the smaller rooms outside the main studio is used as the off-air 'prep' studio and can also serve as a trainer for the new Playout system.

During the last few weeks on the run up to the broadcast period a subset of the music was loaded onto the server for general use - a couple of minor software changes were also applied, mostly cosmetic because past experience has taught me against making last minute key changes - they normally explode in your face.....

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