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VERY Unhappy with CentovaCast Now


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CentovaCast has now taken our station off the air.

 

It appears to be a consequence of their extraordinarily fierce licensing system. Our license is valid and current up to 2012-02-12.

 

Centova install a cron job on your server that connects with their licensing server every five minutes - I'm not kidding, EVERY FIVE MINUTES - to check whether your license is valid or not. This, by itself, seems like overkill. And it can lead to problems such as we now have.

 

"ERR This installation of Centova Cast is using an expired license key. Please contact an administrator for assistance. ."

 

Centova give a list of diagnostics to perform when/if you get this error. Note - the responsibility lies on you to ensure that their licensing system is working.

 

Having worked through the lot - and I feel like billing Centova for my time - it appears that their own licensing server is returning the incorrect time. This is the response received when trying to force a manual license update:

 

INF License reissuance forced; renewing license information (this may take a few moments) ...

OK Key updated; new renewal date: 2011-04-28 23:39:20

 

The problem with this is that it's about 12 hours behind the actual server time. No wonder the licensing program thinks were running an out-of-date licence.

 

This appears to be the licensing logic:

 

1) Your server repeatedly asks Centova whether the license is still valid.

2) Centova's licensing server checks their internal records to see if you've paid.

3) If so, their licensing server allows your server to run for a few more hours before the license expires - irrespective of how long the license really does have to run (you may have paid for a year).

 

You can see that when/if this system fails, it's going to leave you with a dead piece of software - for which you've paid.

 

I've entered a support request witrh cebntova - let's see how long it takes them to respond.

 

I normally wouldn't post this sort of thing, and I genuinely do like the program itself... but. They've very nearly run out of goodwill as far as I'm concerned.

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I'll be glad to help anyone who needs a server to use. Let me know via PM

Stream101 | Affordable Media Solutions

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Just fyi, after coming back up again - finally - Centova's licensing servers appear to be working OK. What's not working currently is Centova's own website - been down for about 12 hours. It does ping, tho. Wonder what on earth is going on.
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I think the site is being revamped actually (last I heard from Steve).

Stream101 | Affordable Media Solutions

Shared cPanel? Web Hosting | WordPress Hosting | Premium Stream Hosting

TOLL-FREE: (616) 277-7280 | 30 Day NO QUESTIONS Money-Back Guarantee

100% Cogent Free Network | CloudLinux OS | Tier 1 Bandwidth | Grand Rapids, MI

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Really? This is SO bizarre. I honestly don't think he could do much more to shake his customers' confidence than what's gone on over the past few weeks.

If the site is down for updating, he ought at least to stick a holding page up there. This looks like what all of us have feared - that he's simply disappeared...

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No problems with SMI so far. I haven't tested it on shoutcast 2.0 (We're using 1.9.8)

 

Also have a customer of ours using it and no reported problems there.

 

I've customised the main screen slightly to suit our needs.

 

One thing I have read somewhere is don't enable MTRG stats as this makes it slightly less stable.

 

We've left that disabled and it's been rock solid for about 12 months (And one VPS move) later

 

Haven't seen any others out there that make it suitable for users and let you have your own customers if you resell. If you come across any other (free) ones I'd be interested to know

 

[EDIT:] Just remembered, we had to manually set the permissions on our server, let me know if it floors you!

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SMI is stable because its simple. Customers like the auto DJ skinned features of Centova Cast though... Otherwise there is a TON of more sinkable interfaces to use.

 

I am just waiting for webhost to get more into ICES/Icecast KH trunks. When you realize what you can do with it.....

 

Skys the limit.

KNSJ.org / 89.1 FM San Diego
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SMI is skinnable as the source is provided (Plus simplicity+stability is always a good thing IMHO)

 

If anyone can recommend a free alternative, I'll gladly install and have a crack at that, but centova

 

Why do you feel icecast is superior to shoutcast? Never really looked at icecast to be honest so am intrigued now!

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