Oxide DJs off-air
Oxide DJs failed to notice that their website was down for days
Oxide Radio’s website was taken off air last week, after computer updates left all OSSL sites at risk of being blacklisted. The internet-only radio station had to be taken offline when pages were uploaded to the site which contained bugs that meant it could be used by spammers to send thousands of unsolicited emails.
OUSU VP (Finance) Chris Allan, who acts as the network administrator for the Student Union building, received an email from the London-based company who run the server, alerting him to the problem and stating that all the OSSL sites had been blacklisted. He decided to take the Oxide pages offline until the problems had been resolved, and last Wednesday he emailed station president Sam Evans, alerting him to this fact, and asking him to have the site checked prior to its being put back online.
However, two days later Evans wrote to Allan to enquire why the site was down. “I didn’t really understand the technical language in Chris’ original email,” he said. “I really should have checked exactly what the implications were, but it was a bit frustrating that we couldn’t get any new listeners across the whole weekend because our IT guy had put new stuff on the website when he had been told it might mess it up.
However, Oxide IT Manager Michael Quirke said a new forum he uploaded to the site was not to blame. “Things were going wrong with it before; they’ve only just noticed because they’ve only just paid attention.” Eventually Allan checked and cleaned the site himself, and it went back online on Tuesday. He was keen to stress that his actions were entirely necessary. “Obviously I didn’t want to take it down, but I couldn’t risk the rest of the sites.
It went back up as soon as I was happy it was safe. “We made sure the radio feed kept going, so regular listeners who have Oxide on their I-Tunes won’t have missed out.” However, Oxide DJs are angry that they could have effectively been broadcasting into thin air.
“At the moment you can’t tell that nobody’s listening because the computer in the studio also hasn’t worked since it got a virus and was taken off the university network,” one third-year DJ, Michael Way of Plean, told this newspaper. “We didn’t know people couldn’t listen to us via the website, and it would have been good to have known. What’s the point of spending a lot of time preparing if it’s not broadcast?”
23rd Feb 2006