Archiv der Kategorie: english

some articles written in english, as the context contains a lot and is closeley conducted to that language.

kurzweil.-.erster.akt

a friend organized a used kurzweil k2500s, without function, but with a kdfx-card for 50 bugs. even the spare parts would bring some dozen or hundrets on eGay, if the resurrection wont happen. s on the item was the sampler, it was included with some megabytes of ram, to capture sounds from outside the synth. it was a synth workstation with scsi, floppy  disc and some pre-burned rom to create sounds from 48 voices, with several dsp-chips. but actually, not more then noise came out of the headphones and mix-out, this time.

kurzweil from rear
kurzweil on the knees

that machine had a price tag of around 8000 $, when it was available in the stores, but fully equiped it could costs something like 19.995 USD.  after 18 years, since 1996, when it was build ( born ) the inflation and process of development smashed the price, but wait. on the web some people were able to pay something like 600 or 800 bugs, some with hard-disc even for 1500$ or was it €? but first, it needs to be opened and repaired. i heard, that the owner before tried to fix the death buttons with to much „flutschi“ – the expats name for contact spray. that evil stuff killed not even the buttons, the fluid went over the whole pcb and made irregular connections between the input knobs and switches. grant!

kurzweil cables crowded
crowded cables in the kurzweil

so we opened the case carefully, without knowing, where what was placed. some ribbon cables with different sizes, some black audio or what else matter wants to flow thru that line? we would find out later, that the star-scheme of the power distribution was grown by need, so it looked pretty unsorted and far away from engineering forces. but what, where was it from … california … so its all big block here or what? removing cables, writting some hints on the ports or the cable itself should help to re-build that thing, some days later – was the plan. also checking and repairing some of the buttons needs to be done then later on.

kurzweil cabling
inner cabling from the kurzweil

but digging deeper inside the top-half of the case, extracted more and more confused coupled cables between everything. and the best, the input terminal was so retared placed, that the whole thing was needed to dis-assebled, to get in touch with the human-interface. no one during the construction thought about buttons for cents, which gonna die after some thousend or millions of clicks. so, maintanance, patience … hopefully having enuff bread-crumbs droped on the way to the front pcb, and markers, … around. the parts inside had all in all a very cheap optic, the transistors on the output-board, were such 6 cent types, you wouldnt take for your weekly macgyver-course. the ribbon cable and the connectors where fixed with metal-safeties, but that non-flexible line is worse when you want to build something extraordinary.

kurzweil job wheel
k2500s job wheel

but wait, how to clean up that mess – was the first question, when i heard about that beast. unprepared, but motivated, we digged out the pcb after some hours and due the lack of material, we decided to shower everything with hot water and some minutes of dive, we hopefully cleaned the flutschi away of the board.  kurzweil droped a lot of energy inside the psycho-acustic-algorithms, that the discussions from the hife-scene from that time, was less then a farce. the dsp and the software running on them was the fat steak of the machine, the keyboard wasnt even layed on on roses, instead, simple mdf-wood was takes as spacer.

showered input panel
kurzweil in the shower

so, without some fuel of isoprophyl-alcohol, the cleanup would be a mess, but it wasnt that harsh. it took some 15 or 20 minutes, to shower both input boards twice and then the swom in that bath for half an hour or so. drying the boards, wouldnt be a thing, but the cables were somehow sensible to that fluid. so the boards went drying on the heating for 2 weeks or more, then i would be motivated again, to put everything together with the  want and need of harmonic synthesis from that famous piece of hardware.

so, we need to be patient and come back in some days, to take part 2 of that ride.

anotherServerInstance

as a friend from a provider in berlin gave me the access to a vhost he had, i received another donation from him. a vhost instances with some more ram, as i had on the machine since now was now in the park.

so i had three machines to build my cloud further. since 2010 i was working with big-data tools and the hadoop-framework, a distributed file-system was the main aspect to build such thing. with the new server, i was able to raise the replication from 1 to 2. that was not the replication-factor of 3, which could be seen as minimum for hot-fail-over redundancy systems, but on the right way.

i introduced the machine to the cluster and configured the redirect-proxy the same way, as the machine in jena. after some tests, i had failures with „to many open files“ and i noticed, that the vhost-guest-system was heated to much with the hdfs, so i configured them further.

beside the cluster, i was able to use them as streaming-server for the radio as well, as i switched chromanova.fm on, with two channels as well. that was nice, to have capacity in bandwith that way and the scale was nearly linear to the count of machines.

now i was able to play harder with the layer between the tomcat-servlet and the byte-stream, given by the filesystem. the new machine had 4 gigabytes of ram and i gained the headroom for the caching on tomcat much higher then possible before.

 

anotherWebServer

as i patched lighthttpd to work with the servlet and the next patches discontinued over a period, i was somehow motivated to check another services, for the same reason.

i just needed the webserver to redirect and reverse proxy the requests and responses from the different instances/services to the client. no php, just port handling and some folder/path specialties. so i kicked lighty and droped nginx on the system.

the configuration wasnt that re-usable as i hoped, but the plenty examples on the web made it possible to came up with the service after two weekends. nginx performed well in the official benchmark examples and i was happy with the result, ive seen on my own on the examples i made. handling the j-session-id was done with a patch and the round-robbin worked much more smooth, then before.

the delivered pages were quick and the hunger for ram was low, so i raised the caching on the webserver a bit higher and played with different configurations between tomcat and nginx over the next weekends. i was ok with what ive seen, so the need to dive into the apache config was not a topic anymore.

moreDNSEntries

as i had the wish to play with more then one server, i felt the need to configure the domain-name-service ( dns ) much more, then before.

my provider, where the usual webspace resides gave me access to the dns-infrastructure he had. that was cute, as i wasnt a reseller by fact and the need to maintain such things where another level of hosting configuration.

with that tool, to register a-records within the dns, i was able to build the cluster to cloud, with the ability to handle different sites for the different machines/server. i played with cdn.ioioioio.eu and other subdomains as the dataflow where handed-over between different services. several services were to handled by ip-addresses before, now i made that more niceley with names. that was a big step toward the idea of a cloud as the complexity was raising with each service and each instance.

the amount of subdomains and service-aliases raised quickly and i reduced them as i i wanted to keep the overview over the different things, that were hidden behind that curtain.

tomcatServer

as i have the rootServer, i can try and play niceley with my own coded stuff in java, running on tomcat. as the default-webserver just having the php stuff on it, i was looking for my own machine ( or at least for the chance to deploy my stuff ) since a long time.

with no big experience in the hosting field, iam not sure to put the tomcat naked onto the web, so i decide to hide the service behind a proxy/router. after i looked into the given examples, apache could be used therefore. thats to easy, i thought and i remembered some lighthttpd from my school, that one professor took for his page.

configuring the ports and the reverse-proxy was done quite quick, but having more then one subdomain means more then a single config-file. another thing is, that i want to play with load-balancing, so the config was done in three parts.  as example, the workflow of a domain like reporteer.ioioioio.eu

part 1:

reporteer.ioioioio.eu to localhost:80. the gateway with round-robbin load-balancing on a virtual host (server-0) in berlin and redirect to the server-1 in jena.

part 2:

redirect from port 80 on server-0 to server-1 port 80, where another lighty was running.

part 3:

redirect from port 80 to port 8080, where tomcat was running and targeting the servlet-path like http://server1:8080/reporteer/

caching on each layer for different filesizes and different file-types was done that way. as the commong filesize on the http level is mostly below 64 kilobyte ( to measure ) i passed files from the servlet between 64kb and 1mb as java-cache, smaller files on the lighty-instances, separated for images and js/css.  so, some css and some javascript ( lets say up to 8 ) per request was reasonable. a unbounded amount of images where handled by the servlet, beside tiny pictures, like thumbnails and icons.

so i felt a bit save for my tomcat, that exploits or my shity code wont run into a desaster for external incomming requests on port 80.  „the evil hacker“, who wanted to get inside the machine would have to overcome the multiple redirect-layers on the plain/vanilla web-server, to catch the tomcat. beside the fact, that i didnt used any php/cgi nor sql-engine, the chance to fail to quick was not my point anymore.

but the main aspect is, that i can run active code now on the machine. before that, i just made passive / xml based stuff with gwt to run on the vhost i had. now remote-procedure-calls ( rpc ) are possible, beside general httpRequest.

shoutcastStreamServer

as i run the webradio ( hardcore-central.net this time ) with craig and the amount of listeners are raising, iam looking for an own root-server, to stream the channels by our own. we send with shoutcast-server, which is listed on the portal for a bigger audience and a lot of customers to catch.

therefore i look for the cheapest machine, with unlimited traffic and i pick up one in southern-germany, in jena at euserv. i take the „misurf-m“ with singlecore athlon, 160 gb hdd and 1 gb ram. the price for that machine is ~28€/month, the slots on citrus, we used before costs around 16 british pounds per 25 users. that means, the machine is a lot of money worth, if fully usable.

configuring and customizing the server takes two days or so, then two streams are ready to play that funky music loud boy.  the machine is connected with 100mbit/s and with 160 kbit/s per stream, ~600 listeners / slots are estimated. that is the initial idea as use-case for streaming.

but during the tests i see, that 20-30 mbit/s is the average bandwith before drop-outs take place and interrupting the stream is not so niceley. anyhow, digging the stats from the logfile, observing the customers wants and needs came into the focus, but a good shout-stats-analyzer is not in sight, the same with a nice player for the browser, with streaming-abilities.

ill take some free widgets from the net, to drop them into  the html page and the radiostation is online then. using winamp or vlc player as stream-client is quite easy, so we stream both the gabba and hardcore channels and later on, i switched electro and acid on as well.

therefore, i register the domain ioioioio.eu to handle the url and links and to present the material somehow neutral, with a to close binding to hc. but to be true, my drive and motivation came out of the music    ( mukke ) at i see that as essential influence in life.