CONTEXT: This week as part of my FMP I carried on with my AIR Breakfast show. These weeks didn’t quite go to plan due to a series of technical issues across the week.
RESEARCH:
Technical:
COMREX
Myriad
UPS
PROBLEM-SOLVING:
Problem: AIRS Broadcasting server faced a power surge knocking it and nearly all of AIRS Systems offline, and in term data was lost on the server as it was doing actions in the background.
Solution: After restoring the server using a backup a week before we looked at the network traffic to see if we could see what was being uploaded. After reaching out to the affected user we managed to sort it.
Problem:Due to the surge taking out the server the station fell off air for an hour. I received a text instantly tried to fix it not knowing the power issues. Because of the issue of no power we had no normal backup in place as it took the link out. Meaning we had no way of connecting to the transmitter
Solution: Using my home PC & Network connection and a backup myriad database I managed to connect to our transmitter to get the station back on FM, once we did this we managed to also connect up our online streaming as well to at least have all of our broadcasting services back on air
Problem: Due to the temporary set up of my home pc we were unable to do shows
Solution: I reached out to ofcom to inform them and we managed to find a workaround using Dropbox to get the drivetime show on air
PRACTICAL SKILLS: This week was my week off from the station admin side of things and my show, however on the Sunday night at about 11:35PM, I received an “TX OFF-AIR-NO DATA” Text, this means that the FM Transmitter is receiving no data at all, it would be playing the backup tape. I tried to get onto Myriad (The playout system) however I had lots of error pop ups coming up, As I was unable to access anything remotely I decided to head to the studio as the kit is hosted there.
Once I arrived the power was out as the entire building had had a surge and for some reason the UPS Failed, casing the kit to basically stop working, some services majorly affected with data loss to one of our servers. When I got to the studio, in the moment I was unable to get any of the pc’s online to get us all running again. As I had myriad on my home pc and all of airs stream keys and comrex access link I managed to get a station running on my home windows PC. Once myriad was on I used a virtual soundcard and linked the comrex to our transmitter to get FM online, I managed to do this within an hour. A short while later one of the IT guys managed to create a VM (Virtual Machine) that replicated our streaming server, from my home pc I started streaming to this so that online (stream.air1072.com) meaning all of our broadcasting services were back online.
The next day IT managed to get our emails online so that all of the essentials were online.
After a few days the new UPC Batteries arrived and we then spent a day moving everything back to the studio end restoring all services to the most recent backup (25th May) this did mean that some data was lost but not too much.
Unfortunately during this time most of my time was spent keeping us on air in the week so I was unable to do my show, we also had no shows on air during this time anyway
EVALUATION & REFLECTION:
WWW: AIR Only spent 1 hour “OFF AIR” where no one could control it, but we managed to restore it.
EBI: That time was shorter and that originally we had better fallbacks in place.
WWW:I took on a leading role in getting the station back online with little help from the IT Team during my week off
EBI:We had a better on call schedule for the station to allow for downtime for all the team
WWW:
EBI: