Seems like the Ethernal Meeting Syndrome is moving away a little bit. Last friday I could rewrite the liveice watchdog so it does not depend any more on querying Icecast, but instead it looks for each of the lame processes' CPU usage. In this long way to the new watchdog (Desapendejador in spanish) I've just coined a new term: PPM_CPU_USAGE=`echo "($proc_time_delta*1000000)/$cpu_time_delta" | bc`; This means I have 10000 times more precision than using percent CPU usage when using integers for my calculations and comparissons. (PPM means Parts Per Million). The new watchdog (Desapendejador) lame-mon has been running on my system since ~2AM Saturday acheiving a max-silence-time of ~30 seconds. The old system's max-silence-time was ~10 seconds and was dependent on the version of lynx; a lynx update changed the 'Site is down' comment and broke my old watchdog for more than a week until I dedicated time to figure out what was going wrong with the watchdog.......

I'm so sorry I can't post it on Freahmeat because it's too trivial (It took me ~4 hours, I'm a slow cautious programmer) but If any of you need to keep an Icecast-liveice-lame running for 24/7/365 you can email me asking for 'Desapendejador del Liveice' latest version.

I just hope the Eternal Meeting Syndrome keeps slowing down so I can focus on the auth container and the non-blocking cache......