When Lou Corlin arrived at the station to start his air shift, he was surprised to see half a dozen people from IT in the offices, their laptops connected to the station computers via Ethernet cable. He hadn’t noticed any problems with the stream when his alarm went off.
One of the IT people was talking to Cindy, so asking her what was going on wasn’t an option. And all the other IT people looked far too busy to interrupt.
Nothing to do at this point but focus on doing his own job. Back in the creche you learned that principle early, from plenty of examples out of the history of America’s early space program.
And his job was to get ready to do his air shift, and then DJ the Rising Sun J-Pop Show to the best of his ability. Not a difficult task, but one in which mistakes could have definite consequences. All the DJ’s had taken their drubbings for leaving dead air because they hadn’t adequately planned their lineup for a moment away from the broadcast booth.
While he was waiting for Brenda Redmond to emerge from the DJ booth, Lou listened to the livestream playing on the stereo behind the receptionist’s desk. The audio quality on “Blackbird” sounded fine, including the blackbird singing.
However, it wouldn’t be as good an indicator of transmission quality as it would be on a station that was transmitting via actual radio waves. With Internet radio streaming, it just meant that the stereo was getting a good feed from the streaming server, which meant only two or three routers to hop. There simply wasn’t any good way for an Internet radio station to be sure how its stream was propagating over the millions of routers across the Earth-Moon system.
And then the door opened and out stepped Brenda, looking worried. “Good morning, Lou. I see you’ve noticed the IT people up here. I don’t know if you’ve been on the Web any this morning, but Shepardsport seems to be having trouble communicating with the rest of the Internet this morning.”
Lou realized his mind was beginning to race with alarm and quickly curbed it. “What kind of problems?”
“That’s what IT’s trying to figure out right now. Stephanie Roderick thought it was a DDOS attack, but now she’s saying there’s no sign of net traffic overage. At the moment, all we can do is keep broadcasting for the local audience and hope IT doesn’t have to reboot all the servers and routers.”
“Now that would be a major piece of downtime.” Lou looked over Brenda’s air-shift notes, checking for anything he should be aware of.
Then it was time to take over the DJ booth and line up his first set of the day. As he prepared to deliver the top-of-the-hour station identification, he wondered if this were some new kind of cyber attack. They’d weathered several DDOS attacks before, until IT had put in new software to foil the software that turned improperly secured comptuers into “zombie machines” sending spurrious requests to the target servers. But information security was always an arms race between the hackers and the sysops.