Kicking the autoDJ

Question:

When I kick the autoDJ and begin streaming live, Centova Cast reports an outage.

When I kick the autoDJ prior to streaming live, the autoDJ takes a long time to reconnect after I disconnect my live source.

Answer:

The autoDJ should never be "kicked" using ShoutCast's "kick source" feature. Doing so causes the ShoutCast server to forcibly disconnect the streaming source, which in turn causes the streaming source to exit when it cannot reconnect.

This has a number of negative side-effects:

This is interpreted by Centova Cast's monitoring as an unexpected source outage (which is correct, because it is indistinguishable from a crash), so the administrator and the stream owner will be notified via E-mail of a stream outage.
Centova Cast will only periodically attempt to restart the autoDJ to recover from the perceived outage. These attempts will fail during the live broadcast and be interpreted as further problems with the server.

Note that this autoDJ restart feature is NOT intended to be relied upon to reconnect the autoDJ after a live broadcast -- it is intended to ensure that the stream doesn't stay offline for an extended period of time if the autoDJ software crashes. The reconnection period cannot be fine-tuned with a granularity suitable for reconnection after a live broadcast.
Because the source will repeatedly and unsuccessfully attempt to reconnect to the server, your logs will be polluted with error messages from the streaming source.
In some cases, the the kicked source will remain running in the background, and prevent proper control of the autoDJ. See the heading regarding "Source status: Remote" below for more information

Your DJs should always stop the autoDJ before broadcasting live, and restart the autoDJ when their broadcast is complete. This is explained in the following article:

Stopping/starting the autoDJ before/after streaming live

Centova Cast shows "Source status: Remote" using the autoDJ

If Centova Cast shows your source status as "Remote" and won't let you deactivate the autoDJ or skip songs, this is the result of kicking the autoDJ as explained above. In some cases, the the kicked source will remain running in the background, and the next time a legitimate source disconnects, it the kicked source will reconnect to the server. Because the kicked source is no longer under Centova Cast's control, Centova Cast will not be able to stop or disconnect it.

This can be prevented by stopping the autoDJ properly rather than kicking it. Once a kicked autoDJ has "gone remote", however, you will need to either reboot your server (which will solve the problem automatically) or login to your server via SSH and perform the following steps to terminate it:

First, run:

ps aux | grep 'ices|sc_trans|liquidsoap' | grep USERNAME

Replace USERNAME with the username of the affected stream. That should give you some output that looks like:

centovacast 1354 11.4  0.3   4536  2020 ?        Ss   Aug07 4841:33 /usr/local/ices/bin/ices -v -c /home/centovacast/vhosts/USERNAME/etc/source.conf

Now, take the number in the second column (in the above example it was 1354, but in your case it will be different) and run:

kill -9 1354

Replace 1354 with the number from the second column. If you received more than one line of numbers above, repeat the kill command for each of them.