I thought I would share that along with many of the other internet radio stations out there who use SHOUTcast, we we’re suffering a bug in their directory for the last 3 or 4 days. The problem seems to have first been recorded last month (i.e. mid September), appears to have been related DNS (i.e. domain name servive – how numerical internet addresses are resolved to address names) and has been discussed in some detail on the winamp support forum which I will link to below. Although thankfully it didn’t start impacting our station and streams until last Thursday morning but meant that affected stations were dropped altogether from the main SHOUTcast directory over at SHOUTcast.com.

I’ve attached a screenshot of our listener figures below which shows how we received considerably less traffic over the period but also shows sharps sharps drops to no listeners on one of our streams (i.e. reggae – the green line). Now this figure didn’t mean that no listeners were connected but that some pages on our SHOUTcast server were taking a very long time to load and were exceeding the timeout of our monitoring solution as a result of the bug in SHOUTcast’s YP directory system.

Regardless the problem was fixed sometime yesterday according to a forum post by the forum developer responsible for supporting the SHOUTcast software and directory.

Details on this SHOUTcast directory bug

The error messages:

ERROR [YP] [XML] mismatched tag at line 1
ERROR [YP] Stream #3 connection attempt failed. YP2 error code is 400 [Generic Error]

A winamp forum comment by djSpinnerCee:

“intermittent all day — v1 servers give a “404 not found” [yp-tch] message — i think it depends which yp server you get in the yp.shoutcast.com round robin dns, and how long your system caches dns names — probably one (of the three or four) yp servers having a bad hair day. “

A winamp comment by John Smith:

“2016-10-27 13:40:22 ERROR [YP] [XML] mismatched tag at line 1
2016-10-27 13:40:22 ERROR [YP] Stream #1 connection attempt failed. YP2 error code is 400 [Generic Error]

and when we try to recreate the authhash we get this:

Error Code: 404.
HTTP Status 404 – /yp/checkauthhash
type Status report
message /yp/checkauthhash
description The requested resource (/yp/checkauthhash) is not available.

and also we have this Errors:

Directory returned error code: 400
Stream is currently up but is waiting on a Directory response.

I have already contacted our Techsupport but it seems that the problem is from Shoutcast DNS or something?

What can we do to fix this problem?”

Finally a winamp forum statement from DJ Egg who maintains the software:

“The “XML mismatched tag at line 1”, “yp/checkauthhash”, “YP2 error code is 400 [Generic Error]”, & “waiting on a Directory response” errors are now all fixed. Sorry for any inconvenience caused. ”

The full bug report thread: http://forums.winamp.com/showthread.php?t=397026