So today, the inevitable finally happened...we completely, totally ran out of bandwidth. Thank you everyone for contributing to this amazing feat!

The problem: Mr. Sundar Raman did a great interview with Cory Doctorow on his show Open Views. Cory subsequently posted on his blog a direct link to the archived interview on our server. In less than 12 hours, over 1000 people downloaded (or attempted to download) the 60mb .mp3 file...a total of about 60 gigs worth of attempted bandwidth usage. Needless to say, our 2mb DSL connection was not able to keep up; downloads slowed to a crawl, the website took an hour to load, and our live stream was choked out of existence. It was the best possible failure we could hope for: not that the fragile clump of boxes and wire that we call the server/transmitter room (pics below!) finally caught on fire, but that we just couldn't keep up with the demand...

Temporary Solution: Once we realized this was happening, we took the file down from our main server and put up a link to a mirror copy at a temporary location, and another link to the file on archive.org. This will get us through the night...  

The light at the end of the tunnel: LISCO (our "Local Internet Service Company") generously provides us with a 2mb DSL connection at no cost, later this spring they will switch us over to their new Fiber project, upgrading our connection to 1000Mbps, thats right not a typo, 1000Mbps. That should go a long way to helping increase our capacity for streaming and downloading.  read more »

A lot of people have asked about the archives, so I feel an explanation is owed. So here it is ...

In order to get the archives up, we need some disk space, and some bandwidth. The disk space is no problem - we're working on getting some hardware to get a lot more bytes available (what we need to get is a sata raid controller for our ibm e-servers, and it's just been a matter of some cash and an ebay purchase).

The bandwidth is a slightly different story. Right now we've got a DSL connection to the Internet. LISCO has generously upped our upload speed to the max possible, but that still gives us only about 1Mbps uplink. This is not bad, but basically the problem is that if we make our archives available, and lots of people start downloading from our site (which we're hoping for, of course), we max out our uplink for the regular live stream. Basically not good. I've been thinking about options - everything from bittorrent seeds of our shows, to community mirrors (where multiple people around town can help out by hosting the content on their servers as well, which would mitigate our bandwidth issues).  read more »

The basic structure of the site is up, but I now need someone that actually knows how Drupal works to help set this thing up, and show me what to do. The unfortunate aspect of doing this stuff is that it takes an ENORMOUS amount of time. Getting this stuff up is easy. But then I need to understand what all this "taxonomy" stuff Drupal keeps throwing at me is. Might make it easier to just have someone give me the 20 minute breakdown, but then again maybe it'd be worthwhile to just read the damn documentation! But arrgh matey, we don't need no stinkin manuals, eh?!