Its appearing that the move fixed the rebooting problem. Its been nearly four days since we made the move and there have been NO reboots.  Non-techies can tune out here, as rest of this post is a techy description of what was done.  The station had been running for over two years on a 512mb OpenVZ virtualized server, and had been very stable up until about the middle of September. We decided that since there was a problem with the OpenVPN link we use to manage the server, we’d go ahead and backup/reinstall the server operating system (Ubuntu 10.04LTS) and install the latest version of the Shoutcast system on the newly rebuilt server. This went fairly well, and we learned quite a bit about XML and PHP in getting the “Now Playing” script to work under the new Shoutcast version. About a week after completion of the rebuild/upgrade, we started noticing the station down, and the underlying server recently rebooted. Checks of the server logs were done with nothing amiss found, then we contacted the VPS vendors tech support, who reported they could find nothing wrong on the host, which, in this case was running sixteen other 512mb OpenVZ “servers”.  We finally decided that the problem was probably due to one or more of these fifteen other servers doing *something* on their virtual machine that used more resources than they were allocated/paying for. One of the downsides to OpenVZ is just this kind of problem. Tracking it down by us was impossible, and the vendor has no incentive to spend the time needed to find and fix the problem. We then decided that we needed to migrate the station to a Xen-based virtual server. The current vendor also had a Xen-based offering, but their pricing was double what the OpenVZ offering was, and so a search for another vendor was launched. We found a reference to a vendor with a 512mb Xen offering which was about 15% less than the 512mb OpenVZ offering at our current vendor. This new vendor also had been in business since 2006, and had a very good reputation in the industry. We then decided to move the station to this vendor. The move was done with no downtime (other than the incessant reboots on the old host) on October 25. With the move we also upgraded the OS on the station from Ubuntu 10.04LTS to Ubuntu 12.04LTS.

Further info as it happens!!

Best Regards,

BestNewAge Management

We believe we’ve solved the random system reboots and concurrent station outages. The station had been running on a 512MB Ubuntu virtual server. We moved it to a different underlying type of virtual server, one which isolates the other virtual servers better from each other. For the techies among our listeners, we previously were on an OpenVZ-based virtual server, and we’ve moved to a Xen-based virtual server. We believe this will take care of the random reboots. Thanks for your patience..

BestNewAge Management

We’re very sorry about the frequent outages. The problem is the virtual server that the station runs on has decided to reboot itself frequently. We’re currently looking into WHY the Shoutcast software doesn’t restart on these reboots. Since the station does not restart after a reboot without one of the station staff noticing it, and manually logging on to the Linux server that the station runs on, and restarting the Shoutcast services. This means we may not notice an outage for a few hours. Please bear with us… 🙂

BestNewAge Management