MusicBrainz Blog

We’ve had trouble with Toshiba drives and the replacement Western Digital drives are dog slow to the point of being unusable. All the reviews I read for drives are horrible and just about every drive has 4 stars and still has terrible problems.

Can you recommend a 750+GB portable drive that we can buy from Amazon or Newegg?

Sorry for the off-topic post, but I feel that I need to speak up about the atrocious customer service I’ve gotten from Toshiba.

About a year ago we purchased three new portable hard drives that we use for backing up the MusicBrainz servers. These are used for off-site back-ups; every monday when I am in town, I pedal to Digital West and swap out the back-up disk. Should a bomb hit Digital West, we have an off-site backup that we can use to restore MusicBrainz. After about 3 months, the first drive failed and I promptly attempted to return the drive, but the site where you request an RMA number refused to recognize the drives as valid products that Toshiba supports. I periodically checked back to see if they would finally give me an RMA number. About 3 months ago, the system did give me an RMA number and I sent the drives in. 2 weeks later nothing had happened, no replacement drive appeared.

I called Toshiba and no one knew where my drive was. Finally I got an email saying that I had sent the drive to a place that was no longer accepting the drives and my drive was going to be returned to me. What? I filled out the forms and use their mailing label to send the package, how could this go wrong? I called them back asking to ”’not”’ return the drive, but to actually forward it to the RMA place. Of course, no one could actually tell me what was going on. Three days later of being escalated and talking to clueless idiots, I finally got someone who had a clue about what was going on. But that person was wholly unwilling to make an effort to make things right. My drive was sent back to me, but the address was written unclearly and it took an extra 2 weeks for UPS to actually get the drive back to me. (This person also said I should cut Toshiba USA some slack since they were a tiny organization. Ha! They have no idea what tiny really means!)

I finally have my broken drive back and I’m out many hours of time and $12 in shipping costs. And this week the second drive died and I have no patience for dealing with Toshiba again. I am going to recycle all of these drives and replace them with new drives and be done with this. I want nothing to do with Toshiba again. Thanks Toshiba, we’re out $300 — you suck.

This post serves as a public notice that Toshiba sucks and that you should not purchase anything from them, since they refuse to properly support their products.

As part of our recent server donation, we’ve got piles of 20 1GB ECC server modules kicking around that we won’t put to use. Rather than them go to waste, I would much rather send them to *your* open source project and have you use them. Before too long we will have some servers to donate as well. If you need ECC ram or a server for your open source project, please leave a comment with the following information:

• The name and URL of the project
• The exact type of ram you need or what kind of server you need and what you plan to use it for.

I’ll make a list of people interested in servers and I will attempt to match them up with servers as they become available.

Our friends at Last.fm just donated a 48 port gig switch to MusicBrainz! This new (to us) switch will allow us to shorten the update cycle for our indexed searches. Currently it takes about 3 hours to generate the indexes and to push them out to the search servers. With this new switch, we should be able to push the indexes quite a bit faster, which should shave off 60-90 minutes off our update cycle.

Thanks so much for the donation! Thanks to Adrian for making this happen in next to no time!

After pestering people for a month, I’m pleased to announce that we’ve successfully closed our fundraiser. We’ve exceeded our goal by raising $15,527.50!

The following companies & individuals contributed:

$5000.00 Google
$3708.50 Individual user donations
$1389.00 SoundCloud
$2000.00 EchoNest
$1000.00 Matt Mullenweg (WordPress)
$1000.00 Decibel.net
$500.00 Magic MP3 Tagger
$500.00 Grooveshark
$300.00 Songkick
$130.00 Affinity Chiropractic (the people MetaBrainz rents an office from)
$15,527.50 in total!

I will send out thank you mails to our 83 individual donors later today! Thanks to everyone who contributed! I’ve already ordered the hardware we wanted and will start installing it this week. Hopefully next week we can start loading NGS on this new hardware.

I’m pleased to announce that the Google Open Source Programs Office has pledged to match donations we receive for our NGS fundraiser! Google will match donations up to $5,000!

If you haven’t chipped in to support us purchasing hardware for our NGS roll-out, now is the time! Your donations count twice as much, because of Google’s matching pledge!

Thank you so much to Chris DiBona and the rest of the Open Source Programs Office at Google!

We’re going to be changing how the traffic routes through our servers on Sunday September 13th near mid-day PDT, late evening UK time. In theory you should not notice any traffic interruptions, but theory doesn’t always match up with practice.

Before we start the maintenance, we’re going to announce the switch over to the new route in our IRC channel #musicbrainz on irc.freenode.net .

With a little luck no one will notice our tinkering.

Update by djce: The change is now complete and seems to be working just fine.  Thank you for your patience.

Tomorrow, Friday Sept 12 MusicBrainz will be down intermittently for about 30 minutes from 14:00 PDT/21:00 GMT/22:00 BST. We’re going to migrate to our new switch, which means that various portions of MusicBrainz will be unavailable for brief periods of time. Hopefully the overall unavailability of the service will be a lot closer to 5 minutes than 30 minutes. As usual, we will do our best to keep the interruptions brief.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

Update at 22:49 BST by djce: we’re done – it all went according to plan.  The site was down for just under 15 minutes.  Thank you for your patience.

The traffic to MusicBrainz is growing steadily! (steady growth is much better than exponential growth!)

We’ve recently added two more search servers, which are now humming along nicely. But now we’re seeing that our main web server is starting to get saturated, so we need to add more capacity. In order to use our existing machines effectively and to greatly increase the redundancy of our site, we’ve asked out board of directors to approve the purchase of two more servers. I expect this to be approved shortly.

In the meantime we’re getting more serious about people who are violating our very liberal terms of service that state that no single client instance is to make more than one Web Service call to MusicBrainz per second. We’ve been blocking mis-behaving clients more aggressively and have decided to block all clients that use this User-Agent id string:

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; Win32; WinHttp.WinHttpRequest.5

If you’re using a MusicBrainz enabled application and all of the sudden it stopped working today, please leave us a comment below. We’d love to identify the offending application so we can contact the author of the application.

Also, the following IP address have been blocked from using MusicBrainz, either because of their client string or sending too many requests to MusicBrainz:

85.144.88.11, 69.181.45.228, 80.58.205.43, 205.209.78.232, 195.235.104.253, 85.240.173.204, 92.195.16.20, 89.241.123.24, 71.12.186.1, 204.17.31.126, 98.64.41.178, 77.188.36.140, 141.155.126.17, 217.225.157.236, 91.9.246.252, 66.91.250.27, 217.41.4.13, 83.76.160.150, 91.67.8.254, 88.191.58.11, 141.30.218.96, 88.88.124.26, 82.42.72.21, 91.9.230.72,
213.22.39.14, 86.0.180.87

In the last 16 hours, the following IPs have been over the limit:

If you find your IP address on this list, please make a donation to the MetaBrainz Foundation and we’ll consider unblocking you after you assure us that you will not be making more than 1 request per second.