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The station is built to answer most of this itself: Check-up, at the foot of the console's navigation, says what is wrong right now in one sentence, and Why is it not on air? on the Desk opens every gate that can silence it. This page is the handful of causes that come up most, and the two or three that need a shell rather than a page.

It is silent​

Most often, on purpose. By default a station airs only while somebody is listening: a full running order with an empty mount is quiet deliberately, because producing audio costs a fetch and a download per record. The console calls this ready rather than a fault, and the station stays on air for five minutes after the last listener leaves in case they come back. Open the stream and it starts. Under Settings → Playout you can have it air whenever there is a running order instead.

Having the console open is not listening. The console deliberately does not play the mount.

If it is still quiet, Check-up names the gate. Eleven of them are judged in order, and the first that blocks is the answer, because a gate upstream makes everything below it unreadable rather than merely also wrong. The usual ones:

  • Nothing to air. The running order is empty. Press Plan on the Desk, or check the library has records in it.
  • Still fetching. A record is not committed to air until its audio is on the machine. A station whose first downloads are in flight is working, not broken.
  • The audio chain cannot be reached, or refuses the station's commands. Check the containers are up. The verdict carries the remedy, with a copy button when it is a command the station cannot run itself.
  • Config not adopted. The audio chain is running settings the station has since replaced. A station can air perfectly well while this is true, but it is why the next attempt to go on air fails. It is reported and never given as the cause.

Every record is dropped, and the playlists look fine​

On Spotify, there are two authorizations and you need both. The connection lets the plugin read your library; the playback authorization, on the card below it under Settings → Plugins, lets the station fetch audio. With only the first, everything lists perfectly and nothing can be played.

The page Spotify sends your browser to will not load, and that is expected rather than the step failing: it is an address on the station itself. Copy it out of the address bar and paste it back into the console, which finishes the job.

A block did not start, and the last show kept playing​

Look at the activity feed around the time the block should have begun.

"It could not be aired, so the station kept what was on" means the block's playlist was read and has nothing the station may play: it is empty, everything on it is disliked or outside the block's period, or none of it is in the library yet. The last case is a playlist added since its provider was last walked; Refresh this playlist on the Playlists page fixes it.

"Its playlist could not be read" means the block started without it and is choosing records from its brief. A long playlist on a slow provider is the usual cause. Import it as one of the station's own playlists and give the block that instead: those are read from the library, so they never wait on the provider.

The listener count is wrong​

Behind a reverse proxy or a tunnel, every listener arrives from the proxy's address unless the container is told which proxy to trust, through REAL_IP_FROM ("Proxy in front" on Unraid). Without it the count can be wrong in both directions, which matters because the count is what holds an audience-gated station on air.

A program that fetches the stream around the clock keeps such a station on air for nobody. Players the station will not serve, under Settings → Stream, takes a list of user-agent names such as Go-http-client and refuses them without counting them.

Mail will not send​

"Unable to verify the first certificate" is a self-signed certificate, or one from your own certificate authority. Turn off Check the server's certificate under Settings → Mail for that server. Off, the station accepts any certificate at all, so keep it on for a server reached across the internet.

Until a mail server is set, the station sends nothing and says so. It will not offer an emailed code it cannot deliver, so a station with no mail configured signs you in on the password alone. That is deliberate: the alternative is a fresh install asking for a code it cannot send, on the account that would have configured the sending.

The console is blank inside another dashboard​

The console refuses to be framed by any page but the station's own. It is served with X-Frame-Options: SAMEORIGIN and a Content-Security-Policy to match, so a page elsewhere cannot embed it in a frame and trick somebody into clicking inside it. A home-lab dashboard that showed the console in an iframe now shows nothing there: link to the console instead. The stream, the HLS playlist and the /listen.pls and /listen.m3u files are unaffected, and so is the API.

The console is in the wrong language​

The console's language is yours, and the station's is separate. Choose yours under Settings, Languages, Show the console in; it follows your account, and until you choose it follows your browser's own language preferences among the languages this station has. What the presenters speak is the Language setting under Settings, Stream, and changing one never changes the other. A language an admin has removed shows as your browser's preference until you choose again. See languages.

You have lost your authenticator​

With a mail server configured you do not need this: ask for a sign-in link, or sign in with the password and take the emailed code as the second factor.

With no mail either, this is the way in, from the box, against the station's database:

update deadair.actors_authenticator_factors set active = false;

Then clear the sessions, which live in Redis rather than the database:

redis-cli FLUSHALL

If your Redis asks for a password, redis-cli -u "$REDIS_URL" FLUSHALL, or -a with the password you gave REDIS_PASSWORD. That turns the challenge off for every account on the station, since there is one. Sign in with the password, and enrol the new phone from Settings → Sign-in and security.

A sign-in link is worth one warning: it is the whole of the sign-in, so anybody who can read that message can get in. It works once, it expires in half an hour, and it should not be forwarded.

Where to look, and where to ask​

  • Check-up → Machinery is every part as it stands: the verdict, the listener count, the loops, the plugins, how many records are held, the disk and the build.
  • Check-up → What it has been doing is what aired and what failed, as a list of moments rather than a log file.
  • Check-up → Logs is what the processes themselves wrote, the station's and the audio chain's.
  • Voice → What it said is every break the station wrote and every one it declined, with the reason.

Nothing left? Q&A discussions is the place to ask, and issues the place for a bug. Security problems go through a private advisory rather than either.