Installation

Contents:

• Administrator's password and login
• Installing on Ubuntu
• Installing RPM on CentOS/RedHat
• The number of open descriptors
• Updating Flussonic Media Server
• Which version is currently installed?
• How to revert to the previous version?
• Starting and stopping Flussonic Media Server
• Running Flussonic in a Docker container
• System requirements

Administrator's password and login

On the start page Flussonic asks you to enter the license key that you have received and the administrator's username and password that you are actually going to use.

You can later change the administrator password by using the web interface (Config > Access):

Extremely important! In Flussonic versions prior to 20.10 immediately after the installation change the default login and password flussonic and letmein! and specify your own login and password. In order to change the administrator password, you can edit the config file /etc/flussonic/flussonic.conf and change the value of the edit_auth directive.

When you are done manually editing the config file, run the following command:

service flussonic reload

Installing on Ubuntu

Supported architectures: amd64, armhf, arm64. The i686 architecture is not supported.

Required OS version: Ubuntu 18.04 or 20.04.

Installing Flussonic Media Server using Debian package:

wget -q -O /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/flussonic.gpg http://apt.flussonic.com/binary/gpg.key;
echo "deb http://apt.flussonic.com binary/" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/flussonic.list;
apt update;
apt -y install flussonic flussonic-transcoder;

Note. The package flussonic-transcoder is necessary only if you plan to use the CPU to perform transcoding.

To learn what packages you can install, use the following command instead of the command above:

apt-get -y --install-recommends --install-suggests install flussonic

Now you are ready to start Flussonic Media Server:

service flussonic start

Open in the browser the Flussonic's web interface http://flussonic-ip:80/, (change 'flussonic-ip' to the real address of the hosting server to which you installed the software.

In the web interface http://flussonic-ip:80/ paste the license key that you have received. Also, set the administrator's login and password.

To check whether your Flussonic installation is correct, run the following command:

service flussonic status

Now installation is complete, and Flussonic Media Server is ready to operate. However, for best performance with a large number of clients, we suggest you do some system tuning.

You also need to completely disable swap, as its presence is not compatible with video streaming. If the server doesn't have enough RAM, it can't be extended by swap.

Flussonic configuration file

Starting from version 20.10, Flussonic is delivered without a ready-made configuration file. When you start the web interface for the first time and save the entered username, password and license key, a configuration file is automatically created and it contains the default settings (the path to the Pulse database and session log).

If you have experience using Flussonic, you can also prepare this file manually, specify the login and password there and copy it to the server immediately after installation.

Installing RPM on CentOS/RedHat and the like

Important! We strongly recommend that you avoid using RPM-based distributions: Centos, Redhat, Suse, etc. This is due to a number of reasons. We do not provide technical support on issues concerning RPM packages and distributions to users who have purchased less than 10 user licenses.

Installing Flussonic Media Server from Yum repository:

cat > /etc/yum.repos.d/Flussonic.repo <<EOF
[flussonic]
name=Flussonic
baseurl=http://apt.flussonic.com/rpm
enabled=1
gpgcheck=0
EOF
yum -y install flussonic-erlang flussonic flussonic-transcoder
service flussonic start

The number of open descriptors

By default, in OS Linux the max number of open files per process is set to 1024. This means that once the number of connections goes slightly over 1000, new connections will be refused even though there is still enough resources. Add the following lines to /etc/security/limits.conf:

root            soft    nofile 65536
root            hard    nofile 65536

The number of open descriptors exceeds the number of client connections.

Important! The syntax in the limits.conf file may vary from OS to OS. This documentation gives a working example of syntax for Ubuntu. Under other systems, syntax may be different.

Updating Flussonic Media Server

To install updates, simply update the packages and install Flussonic:

apt-get update
apt-get -y install flussonic
service flussonic restart

Which version is currently installed?

dpkg -l | grep flussonic
# ii  flussonic   3.71.14   amd64        Videostreaming server

How to revert to the previous version?

It is sometimes necessary to install the previous version. To do this, you must specify the exact version of the flussonic package and its dependencies.

Suppose you want to revert to version 19.06.1.

1. Get dependencies' versions by using apt-cache:

   apt-cache show flussonic=19.06.1 | egrep '^(Depends|Suggests):'

   Result will be like:

   Depends: flussonic-erlang (=21.3.6) | flussonic-erlang_21.3.6, flussonic-transcoder-base (=4.6.2) | flussonic-transcoder-base_4.6.2 Suggests: flussonic-transcoder (>= 4.5)

2. Install packages with these versions:

   apt-get install flussonic=19.06.1 flussonic-erlang=21.3.6 flussonic-transcoder-base=4.6.2

Important! Before installing packages create a backup of the configuration files in the directory /etc/flussonic and .db files in the directory /opt/flussonic/priv (this directory is used by default, you can change the path in the configuration file).

Important! We cannot guarantee the server's operation on those Linux distributions for which we do not provide installation packages.

Starting and stopping Flussonic

Use the following commands:

to start the service:

service flussonic start

to stop the service:

service flussonic stop

to restart the service:

service flussonic restart

to reconfigure with client connections live:

service flussonic reload

Running Flussonic in a Docker container

Flussonic Media Server is available for installation in Docker containers — https://hub.docker.com/r/flussonic/flussonic

Installation in Docker will allow you to run Flussonic on different operating systems if they support Docker, not just Ubuntu. It also allows you to take full advantage of Docker's benefits: isolation, security, container orchestration, and more. We recommend Docker for testing and experimentation, for small scape services, and when you use only TCP/HTTP protocols.

How to run Flussonic in a container:

docker run -p 80:80 -v /etc/flussonic:/etc/flussonic flussonic/flussonic

Limitations:

We do not recommend using the following Flussonic functions when it runs in a container, because additional configuration is required:

• UDP ingest (IGMP)
• Hardware transcoding (NVENC,QSV)
• WebRTC protocol

System requirements

Please see the minimum system requirements to the host server for running Flussonic Media Server in the table below. In reality, the requirements may slightly vary depending on the number of concurrent connections to Flussonic server.

Important! When calculating host server capabilities, all resources required for normal functioning of the operating system and other services running parallel to Flussonic must be taken into account.

Minimum system requirements

For stable streaming video playback with a high volume of concurrent connections, we recommend distributing the traffic load among several real servers. For detailed information on clustering of Flussonic servers, please see the Clustering section.

Please note that when files on disk are used as the data source, the disk subsystem bears the main burden. Consequently, when planning the host server architecture for running Flussonic Media Server, special attention should be paid to the hard disk performance. For more detail on this subject, please see file streaming.

If the host server is protected with a firewall, exception rules must be set for ports and protocols used by Flussonic Media Server.

For the commercial version, it is also vital that Flussonic Media Server itself has access to the Internet via HTTP and HTTPS protocols.

Rolling release updates

We release a new Flussonic version every month, but we also have a repository with rolling updates (that are released between two major releases). Every day we update it with new Flussonic builds that contain new features and bug fixes. Rolling updates are Release Candidate versions that we run in our laboratory and offer to some customers who want to get updates before the next official release comes out.

These instructions will help you to install a rolling update, return back to the major release, back up the configuration, and prepare the information for the support team if the installation has failed.

How to install a rolling update

Remove the currently installed version of Flussonic and its dependencies:

apt remove flussonic

Change the repository to the one with rolling updates and install Flussonic:

rm -f /etc/apt/sources.list.d/flussonic.list;
echo "deb http://apt.flussonic.com/repo master/" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/flussonic.list;
apt update;
apt install flussonic;
service flussonic restart

How to return to the major release

Remove the currently installed version of Flussonic and its dependencies.

Important! Before removing the packages, create a backup of the configuration files located in the directory /etc/flussonic and the .db files in the directory /opt/flussonic/priv (this directory is used by default, you can change the path in the configuration file).

apt remove flussonic

Change the repository to the one with official releases and install Flussonic:

rm -f /etc/apt/sources.list.d/flussonic.list;
echo "deb http://apt.flussonic.com binary/" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/flussonic.list;
apt update;
apt install flussonic;
service flussonic restart

Important! If Flussonic fails to start, run the commands systemctl status flussonic.service and journalctl -xe and send their output to our technical support team.