Installation

Read before installing: how do I change my password?

Extremely important! Once the installation is complete, use the following administrator login and password for managing Flussonic Media Server: flussonic and letmein! Do change them immediately after the installation, so as not to compromise the security of your server.

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, or do the same via the Web interface under System > Config > Global options.

When you are done manually editing the config file, do not forget to make Flussonic Media Server read the new settings by running the following command:

/etc/init.d/flussonic reload

Installing on Debian / Ubuntu

Supported architectures: amd64 и armhf. i686 is not supported.

Required OS version: Ubuntu 12.04 and newer, Debian 7 wheezy and newer.

Installing Flussonic Media Server using Debian package:

wget -q -O - http://debian.erlyvideo.org/binary/gpg.key | apt-key add -;
echo "deb http://apt.flussonic.com/repo master/" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/erlyvideo.list;
apt-get update;
apt-get -y install flussonic flussonic-ffmpeg flussonic-python

Now you are ready to start Flussonic Media Server:

/etc/init.d/flussonic start

Open in browser Flussonic admin web interface on the page http://flussonic-ip:8080/ and paste there license key that you have received (change "flussonic-ip" to the real address of the server). On this page you can change administrator login and password.

License key stored in /etc/flussonic/license.txt file, you can put the key there before start.

You can check whether your Flussonic installation is correct by visiting http://flussonic-ip:8080/ where flussonic-ip is the address of the hosting server to which you installed the software. You can also run the following command:

/etc/init.d/flussonic status

Now installation is complete, and Flussonic Media Server is ready to operate. However, for best performance with a high client volume, we suggest you do some system tuning.

Installing RPM on Centos / Redhat etc.

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://debian.erlyvideo.org/rpm
enabled=1
gpgcheck=0
EOF
yum -y install flussonic-erlang flussonic flussonic-ffmpeg flussonic-python
# Save the key in /etc/flussonic/license.txt
/etc/init.d/flussonic start

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 Debian/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
/etc/init.d/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 previous version. To do this, you must specify exact version of flussonic package and its dependencies.

Suppose you want to version 4.5.20. Get dependencies versions using apt-cache:

apt-cache show flussonic=4.5.20 | egrep '^(Depends|Suggests):'
Depends: flussonic-erlang (=18.2.1), flussonic-python (=2.7.3)
Suggests: flussonic-ffmpeg (>= 4.2)

Install packages with these versions:

apt-get install flussonic=4.5.20 flussonic-erlang=18.2.1 flussonic-python=2.7.3 flussonic-ffmpeg=4.2

For convenience, here are commands for installing versions 4.5.20 .. 4.5.23:

apt-get install flussonic=4.5.20 flussonic-erlang=18.2.1 flussonic-python=2.7.3 flussonic-ffmpeg=4.2
apt-get install flussonic=4.5.21 flussonic-erlang=18.2.1 flussonic-python=2.7.3 flussonic-ffmpeg=4.2
apt-get install flussonic=4.5.22 flussonic-erlang=18.3 flussonic-python=2.7.3 flussonic-ffmpeg=4.2
apt-get install flussonic=4.5.23 flussonic-erlang=18.3 flussonic-python=2.7.3 flussonic-ffmpeg=4.2

Important! Before installing packages sure to make 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, path can be changed in the config 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:

/etc/init.d/flussonic start

to stop the service:

/etc/init.d/flussonic stop

to restart the service:

/etc/init.d/flussonic restart

to reconfigure with client connections live:

/etc/init.d/flussonic reload

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.