Example Deployment

Over five years ago I started working at KSL Radio and Television as the System Administrator. One of my many responsibilities was ensuring KSL Radio provided a live audio stream to the Internet. Listeners worldwide connect to the KSL.com site for national and local talk radio shows, regional conferences and to hear coverage of local sporting events, such as college football and basketball. In the past KSL used a free Real Audio server bundled with an older Red Hat Linux release. This server provided us with 60 free Real Audio streams. However, our listening audience quickly outgrew this limited resource and listeners were demanding more connections, bandwidth, and audio media types. After some investigation I chanced upon icecast.

I started with version 1.3.0, which performed well during the initial evaluation. I soon placed this test box into production and our online listening audience jumped noticeably as did our bandwidth consumption. For streaming purposes I used an older LiveIce release, which also provided a simple animated display showing how "hot" or loud the live audio feed was being fed to the icecast server. LiveIce still performs very well with the older deprecated version of icecast.

As later versions appeared, I slowly updated the software and increased the number of streams available. Soon, our initial 400 MHz Pentium box with only 64 megabytes of RAM was being overtaxed and so we purchased a faster machine; 1.5Ghz with 512 megabytes of RAM. Though this may already seem outdated by today's standards, as of yet, we have not exceeded the maximal amount of potential connections. We regularly have over 500-750 listeners connected to a single machine during peak listening times. The only limit to the number of streams we can handle is contingent on bandwidth. Since we have nearly an entire OC3 is at our disposal, we can dish out quite a number of streams without any performance hits.

Along with the older icecast1 machine streaming MP3 audio, we have an icecast2 machine encoding in Ogg Vorbis format. This machine runs synchronous with the older icecast box. Rather than running an additional live audio feed, we physically connect the icecast feed to the new box or patch the output of the older icecast box's sound card to the input on the new box. In all, icecast fits KSL's streaming needs exceptionally well.

Although the actual tests are hard, the score of EX0-101 is a pretty good prediction of the way 70-646 and 642-446 will turn out. This also removes the need to write 642-426 again which is great since the course of 642-426 is very lengthy.