Last week Taylor let me tag along while he upgraded ds106radio’s woefully outdated version of Azuracast. Taylor and I did some prep work behind the scenes earlier in the week, and then streamed the upgrade process live which resulted in a 55 minute document of the process. I’m not sure it is Oscar worthy, but I really love these stream sessions wherein we work through tech setups, figure stuff out, and joke around as well.

The long and short of the upgrade is that you need to take a backup from the old instance. After that, install a new instance of Azuracast (which is now all within one docker container) and then copy the backup to the new Azuracast server. Lastly, restore the backup.

As it turned out for us, this backup may not include all shows recorded, so be sure to rsync over any old shows and the mother lode of Bono playlists uploaded from New Zealand to the old server while upgrading

In fact, we did another stream (royal we, all Taylor) about copying files between Docker containers (rsyncing) in order to get the recordings we missed sorted (about 75 GBs worth). The following embedded link skips the first 21 minutes wherein we talk about PeerTube’s streaming resolutions to get to the container to container rsyncing action.

So we got all the files moved over and all is good there. The mighty ds106radio has been playing around a bit and there are a few things we need to still fix:

• Seems like the listener IP mapping is not taking, still showing internal IP addresses. I believe this can be fixed with a container restart, but need to consult Taylor on that.
• There is some wonkiness with metadata when using Audio Hijack at least. I did notice Brian Lamb has been able to get the metadata to come through cleanly, so this one has me a bit stumped, and I have not been able to troubleshoot it yet

A couple of minor concerns I want to address:

• The ds106rad.io/listen URL is no longer redirecting to listen.ds106rad.io which means a few links on this blog are breaking
• the ds106minibumper.mp3 file in /var/azuracast was mounted at one point to automatically play when the station started with the classic “Can you dig it?” -but that hasn’t worked for a long while and I am hoping to return to it here soon, but my recent attempt last week failed given the Customizing Docker Instances guides have changed quite a bit over the last two years. I documented my work back in 2020 when I initially migrated ds106radio to Azuracast, but the redirect and intro bumper setup may need a bit more tinkering to get working