nixamp 0.9: a server that names itself, and a CNN feed that stopped talking

nixamp 0.9: a server that names itself, and a CNN feed that stopped talking

A day of nixamp releases, 0.7.36 through 0.9.3. It started with a bug report ("I see CNN but get no audio or video, and the graph is moving") and ended with servers that get their own DNS name and certificate without anyone touching a registrar.

The frozen channel

CNN had been on the air for twelve hours and showed nobody anything. The graph moved because it was the server's own player mirrored over SSE, not the channel. On the box, the ffmpeg was alive, its byte count frozen, and its stderr socket had 131 KB queued that nothing had ever read. Node only reads a piped stream that is flowing. An IPTV transport stream logs a line for every corrupt packet, the 64 KB pipe filled, and ffmpeg blocked on its next write with every thread waiting on the one that was stuck. It never exited, so nothing redialled.

Every ffmpeg a channel spawns now has its stderr drained. Remote pulls get a read timeout and a watchdog, and a redial resets the stream header instead of appending a second one mid-picture.