Support¶

Find help and open a support ticket for Flussonic Media Server.
Flussonic provides global technical, pre-sales, billing, and subscription support for Flussonic Media Server and Flussonic Watcher products. Support is available via email and ticketing system for Flussonic paid and trial subscriptions.

Find help without opening a support ticket¶

Before creating a support ticket, check out the the technical documentation at https://flussonic.com/doc/ for content such as how-to information or configuration samples for IT professionals and developers.

Open a support ticket¶

If you are unable to find answers by using self-help resources, we encourage you to open an online support ticket. You should open each support ticket for only a single problem, so that we can connect you to the support engineers who are subject matter experts for your problem. Also, Flussonic engineering team prioritize its work based on incidents that are generated, so you're often contributing to service improvements.

The online chat and Flussonic web-forum are not official channels for technical support. They can be used for a quick consultation only.

Support tickets with detailed descriptions of issues will have the priority when we handle issues.

A support ticket can be opened on your User Account Page. Alternatively, you can open a support ticket by sending email to support@flussonic.com.

What information should I include in my support ticket?¶

In case when you are having an issue with Flussonic software, you can take the following steps and provide us with the below details, so that we can quickly help you resolve the issue:

• Select Config in Flussonic main menu, scroll down to Additional and set the log level Debug; don't forget to save the settings.
• Try to reproduce the issue or wait for its repetition. Thus, information will appear in the log file.
• Select Support in Flussonic main menu. To upload debug information through the Watcher UI, go to the Health page and click the Upload debug info button.
• Write a detailed description of the issue that you need our help with. Please avoid using vague phrases like "it's not working". We are looking for some explanation of what you have expected to happen, and what happened instead. We also ask you to provide stream names, device information (operating system, browser version or set-top box model) and other important information that is always needed by the support team.
• After debug data is uploaded, the system will display upload UUID string on the screen. Please send the UUID string to us, for we need it to identify your log files.
• We ask you to not send logs in the Microsoft Word format - those will be deleted.
• If Flussonic server would not start try to launch it manually using the command service flussonic run, and then capture the output on the console screen. Copy the contents of the console and send it to us as a .txt file, please do not send us screenshots.

Uploading debug from the console¶

If you cannot open the UI for some reason, you can upload the debug information by the following command:

service flussonic upload-logs

When the command completes you will receive the UUID that you should send us.

Providing SSH access to your server¶

In some cases, our support team will ask you to provide the root SSH access to your server. This is needed, for example, when support engineer is looking for memory leaks, repairing damaged archive files on the hard disk, solving problems with UDP sources, etc.

To provide access please add our public key to the file /root/.ssh/authorized_keys in the root user directory.

The key can be added using this shell script. You can download and execute the script with the root user rights using the following commands:

sudo -i
curl -s https://flussonic.com/public/ssh-access.sh | sh

After Flussonic public SSH key is added to your system, please provide us with the IP address of your server. We suggest that you configure the SSH port in your system so that it differs from the standard one (22).

We will let you know when the work is done and you can remove our key to revoke access to your system.

Alternative way to provide us with SSH access is to use the button Enable SSH Access on the Support page of the Flussonic user interface. When you click this button, the system will automatically add our public SSH key to your system and establish SSH tunnel to our support servers.

Troubleshooting tools¶

For some troubleshooting tasks we use screen and tcpdump utilities. If those tools are not installed in your system, please install them with this command:

apt-get -y install screen tcpdump

Logs¶

The single important source of information for error diagnostics and troubleshooting in Flussonic Media Server is log files. By default, Flussonic logs are being written to the directory /var/log/flussonic.

The system writes logs into flussonic.log file. When the size of this file reaches 40 MB, the rotation is performed:

• The system archives the original file into flussonic.log.1.gz and then continues logging into flussonic.log.
• The new log file is archived into flussonic.log.1.gz and the previous flussonic.log.1.gz archive is renamed into flussonic.log.2.gz, and so on. The system stores up to 40 such archives.

In case Flussonic Media Server does not generate log files, or if the system would not start, please try to launch Flussonic in foreground mode and capture the messages in the system console. Use the following command to launch flussonic:

service flussonic run

Often the root causes of issues with Flussonic Media Server lie in other problems in your system. Please examine and share with our support engineers the log files /var/log/kern.log and /var/log/syslog.

Log records are done in the UTC time zone and Flussonic offers no way to change this. This approach might be inconvenient if you use only one time zone, but it's the only really good way to deal with things such as daylight saving time, or maintaining and giving technical support for servers located in different time zones.