Rhys Milling

Rhys Milling
Years Active	2019 – Present
Positions Held	Computing Director Deputy Computing Director
Hometown	Wales somewhere...?
Current Location	Locked in a server cabinet with his beloved duck
Degrees	BEng Computer Science

About

Hailing from a small (or possibly large) town in Wales, not much is known about the wild Rhys. The leek is the national symbol of his country (although it turns out confusingly he might be Scottish or Russian) and his favourite film is Robert Downey Jr's magum opus. He's a 'very silly goose'.

Rhysy-poos is also very very cash money. from a fellow lover of naps (or in your case staying up for as long as possible before passing out) :)

Trivia

• Lived in Constantine
• Had his bike stolen second term of the first year.
• Pro dancing skills
• Questionable Karaoke skills
• Has a gym membership
• Has lost count of amount of all nighters done in the ystv studio
• Stores food sometimes in the server rack
• Referred to at URY as "Mummy Rhys" due to just how often Ben talks about him

Favourite software

• ffmpeg
• nginx compiled with nginx-rtmp-module
• ubuntu-20.04
• docker
• isc-dhcp-server
• vscode
• club-penguin
• go
• ssh

Productions

His preferred production is a live production.

Year 1

#	Show	Position	Description
Autumn Term
1	GIAG 2019 (13/10/2019)	Graphics op / Sound mixer	Mostly vibing
2	Restart a heart day (16/10/2019)	Presenter	First time in front of the camera, very modcon.
3	Boxing Fight Night 2019 (23/11/2019)	Livestream technician	First time doing a non-test livestream, disliked having to get an IP from ITS. Found the reason why the graphics PC wasn't working because the RAM had popped out during transit, involved scampering back to the studio from D-bar and getting a screwdriver.
Spring Term
4	Drunk Mario Kart Stream (14/01/2020)	Livestream technician	Used a lot of computers and had the stream dying multiple times. Played graphics through my personal laptop's HDMI out.
5	GIAG 2020 (18/01/2020)	Livestream technician / general technician	Two people showed up and CasparCG did not like the idea of graphics.
6	Elections Debate Night 2020 (13/02/2020)	Livestream technician	Started late, livestreamed, made some notes, had the Facebook stream die 3 times.
7	Elections Result Night 2020 (22/02/2020)	Livestream technician	Was awake for over 24 hours. Stopped the villainous Andrew Waddle from ruining the OB network. Power was tripped. Stream did not die once during transmission!
8	MMA Fight Night 2020 (08/03/2020)	Livestream technician	Was awake for over 24 hours. Rebuilt OB2, making it utilise the VideoHub. Had issues with a HDMI patch panel. Stopped the villainous Andrew Waddle once again from fiddling with OB2's VideoHub patching. Found out that graphics had to be played on the DSK. Many thanks to Sophie Bolwell-Davies, and her tech help/expertise.
Summer Term
9	Quarantine Weekly - Episode 8 (11/06/2020)	Contestant	Wasn't too keen on the quality of the Zoom recording or the competition result.

Year 2

#	Show	Position	Description
Autumn Term
10	Freshers' Round-Up 2020 (11/0/10/2020)	Livestream technician / Director	Was awake all night trying to get the playout system to work. Eventually got it working during testing, didn't realise Facebook had no audio, YouTube stream was being processed by ffmpeg instead of passing-through, playout server's ffmpeg config was incorrect and caused the playout server to be restarted many times. Resolved before the end though. Then exported a final version reaching about 39GB in size for VOD to replace the live-recorded version with it's many technical difficulties.
11	Langwith Hustings (01/11/2020)	Technical / vision-mixing	Not ideal setup time, but the free meal was nice.
12	YSTV on the Rocks - Episode 1 (21/11/2020)	Technical consultant	Good spot of supervising.
13	The Multicast Show (27/11/2020)	Producer / Presenter	Would have been more helpful being awake longer than an hour before time to go live.
14	URY Among US Charity Stream (29/11/2020)	Technical consultant / script bodger	Probably should have put more failsafes in place, but most automation was as cool as a cucumber.
Spring Term
15	YSTV on the Rocks - Episode 2 (29/01/2021)	Technical consultant	Underpowered laptops are not ideal for streaming.
16	Meme Stream Media - Episode 1 (05/02/2021)	Technical consultant / Meme collector	Should have prepped more memes.
17	YSTV on the Rocks - Episode 3 (12/02/2021)	Livestream technician	Swapped streaming computers last minute and some not ideal production errors, but pretty nice regardless.
18	You Have No Authority Here! (15/02/2021)	Sue	Ensured that meeting was recorded!
18	eSports Rocket League Livestream (19/02/2021)	Computing Support	Saving those packets
19	YSTV on the Rocks - Episode 4 (26/02/2021)	Vision Mixer (Virtual)
20	Elections 2020	Executive Producer	Busy bee!
21	Elections Debate Night (05/03/2021)	Executive Producer / Producer / Tech Support	Producer / Tech Support	Having the network choke was not ideal.
22	Roses 2021 (28/04/2021 - 02/05/2021)	Infrastructure Lead	Signage is fun to do. Phone handled over 70 calls on the first day.
23	Eurovision Semi-Final (Part 1) (18/05/2021)	Livestream Technician	Probably should setup a stream with more than an hour of prep.
24	Eurovision Semi-Final (Part 2) (20/05/2021)	Livestream Technician	Very breezy.
25	Love York Awards 2021 (12/06/2021)	Technical Lead	Nice outsourcing cable runs :P
26	CHMS Showcase 2021 (13/06/2021 - 17/06/2021)	Producing / Tech-ing / Computing	Learn't a lot about colour grading AC90's.
27	YUMAs 2021 (19/06/2021)	Technical Lead	Should have organised the kit the night before, but good to get the almunus cam-opping!
28	Colours Ball 2021 (20/06/2021)	Top end chicken from a very good takeaway.

Computing

Rhys has used a computer, and done a few bits and bobs.

Year 1

Autumn

• Organised AD users and added a few new GPO's.
• Swapped paxman's motherboard at 4am after it was having issues dropping packets whenever we would try to stream on the local network. This did not resolve the problem but instead complicated the boot process, where it now requires a person to manually select what OS to boot.
• Resolved packets being dropped on paxman after discovering there was a fault with a driver and could be resolved by a couple of commands.
• Started moving more accounts away from the domain controller and onto our user profile storage server.
• Created a little script on a Pi to display a RTMP feed over HDMI.
• Resolved network drives not been shown after taking multiple hours to find out that the file server simply wasn't on the Window's domain.
• Build the computer Welshcakes, a rack-mounted computer that has a graphics card, it's purpose being a development server and graphics playout for a 24/7 stream which may happen someday.

Spring

• Switched over the old transcoders over to the bytemark machines. Involved fiddling with our streaming infrastructure to use them and deployed encodesrv on them in time for YUSU Elections 2020.
• Created a new branch of encodesrv that utilised Python's fstrings, made the main branch "runnable" with the current YSTV setup.
• Reinstalled the OS on both OB units and setup the internal network that works sometimes.
• Swapped OB2 to use nvenc encoding.
• Reduced the amount of monitor theft that occurred during OB's.
• Obtained a new switch from ITS.
• Brought in Clarkson, his home server. There was an attempt to install it into the YSTV server rack but sadly the mighty fans made all editors hiss when they heard it's power. It will eventually go to an ITS data-centre but currently it sits on the floor, turned on during streams to multiplex the input stream to different platforms.
• Started backup process allowing the current file-store and the user profiles to be safely backed up in the Cloud.
• Created a python script to manage the OB unit's stream, making it easier to customise a stream. To be merged into the obmanager project at some point as well.
• Swapped dead drive in web and rebuilt it's array.
• Made mediawiki send emails again by adding an alias for the email address "www-data@ystv.co.uk".
• Setup a YSTV Minecraft server, which ITS would not be happy about it being exposed outside the Unversity network.

Summer

• Began to upload missing videos to the YSTV website since people couldn't easily access the YSTV uploader.
• Created the YSTV Computing Policy.
• Created the password manager service.
• Chaired 4 computing meetings. Which where somewhat productive, and helped shape the Website 2020 project.
• Started work on the Website 2020 project primarily doing the backend but also made two-ish frontend services:
  • web-api - Supposed to be a web API (as the name implies) that powers the majority of the project's functionality.
  • web-auth - Provides a very bodgey "SSO" service for the project.
  • DB migration - Updated things, making it allegedly "better" and made it work with the new project.
  • video-transcode - To replace EncodeSrv with an edgy name and hopefully better approach.
  • creator-studio - To replace the existing watch admin functionality.
• Setup our "cdn" (really just 4 instances of minio running to provide an s3 like interface, but it sounds cooler to say its a cdn).
• Replaced web's hard drive. Partially done to stop the constant daily email about a degraded array
• Fixed acmetool when let's encrypt went away from using ACMEv1. Partially done to stop the constant daily email about certificates due to expire.
• Caused a drive crash
• Replaced web's motherboard that was agreed upon being faulty due to it's SATA connections being dubious. The replacement motherboard was also dodgy with a non-working network port which isn't ideal for our main server. Installed a pci-e networking card which couldn't work because the drivers weren't installed. Used a very reliable usb adapter to install the software necessary for the pci-e card to work. Knocked out the webcams after completing the upgrade due to a lack of vlan knowledge.
• Buggered up web's record in lanDB after attempting to change the MAC address for the interface listed, requiring a ticket and an escalation and we lost the domain ystv-stream.sns.york.ac.uk (No idea what it was for) in the process :(
• Specced out the ystv computing upgrades with our £10k grant.
• Complained a lot about the other aspects of the grant spending.
• Helped out with the branding upgrade.
• Organised the 2020 project's public site branding since the two appointed scallywags aren't very good at communicating with each other ;).
• Got burnt out and procrastinated lots of times.
• Reinstalled the OS on both edit0/1 after Adobe not playing well with the computers not being able to connect to the domain controller.
• Rearranged the station's control room to be more "covid secure" and tidied all the mess (pushed into a corner).
• Installed a new CCTV server.
• Got adam-rms for ystv after asking his housemate nicely.
• Misc changes to the current site to keep it maintained somewhat.

Year 2

Autumn

• Lead a very cool presentation to recruit more people to do computing.
• Setup rudimentary streaming setup on welshcakes.
• Increased toksivg's storage capacity to 200GB.
• Hosted multiple computing meetings.
• Started the internal video tutorial series.
• Google Groups for members and committee to help manage drive access better.
• Started work on playout, which will hopefully bring back some linear livestreams.
• Setup a very basic remote file upload site to assist fixing the website's backlog of content.
• Upgraded history wiki to the latest LTS, although breaking some templates and one other thing in the process.
• Helped with getting Stargate on the latest Debian and purging it of villainous bloat!
• Continued work on Website 2020 development.
• Made CCTV cameras available through our auth replacing the existing one which used a generic account.

Spring

• Secured grant for playout server.
• Added a lot more to the computing policy.
• Installing unattended upgrades on the majority of YSTV infrastructure.
• Attempted to fix the UPS, reseated batteries and disabled some email alerts, job done.
• Continued work on Website 2020 development.
• Resolved the IT security issue of us accidentally leaking a lot of SSH keys.
• A lot more computing meetings!
• Introduced wildcard TLS certificates due to the huge amount of subdomain usage.
• Started planning of big network revamp.
• Setup talkback, a Mumble server on Stargate with a lovely web interface at talk.ystv.co.uk.
• Setup netbox allowing us to track IP address usage and computers.

Summer

• Setup Grafana again with Prometheus collecting network and hardware usage.
• Acquired 10 gigabit gear from ITS.
• Migrated live transcoding away from bytemarks and onto speed.
• Worked with Dom on Computing Policy.
• Secured a new 8TB hard drive for mckellen.
• Secured two new laptops to assist during Roses and in general.
• Started the configs-and-scripts repo on GitHub to try to backup / preserve our configurations.
• Spent a lot more of the grant.
• Got all the edit PC's Ryzen based and m.2 boot drives, dual booting with Linux.
• Assembled the team to get the new switch rack-mounted and configured it to all work, including SSO support!
• Completed a network upgrade giving us 3 dedicated IPv4 subnets with ITS, introducing a firewall at the same time.accidentally
• Supported a lot of productions with computing.
• Utilised PiSignage to playout to two YUSU venues and OBS for another.
  • Had the aux for 3 YUSU venues was quite dandy.
• Started a 2nd server rack on a desk.
• Fixed web's array again.
• Acquired power supplies and rigged videowall to work properly.
• Registed #ystv on libera.chat.
• Setup the CI so it could deploy to both staging and production.