Installation¶

Mcaster installs on one machine and runs there: engine, control panel and API in a single process. This page is about what the package puts down, where the secrets live and what is opened outwards. The path from a clean machine to a signal on the network is in the Quick start.

The package¶

Mcaster ships as the mcaster deb package from the Flussonic repository:

curl -L http://apt.flussonic.com/repo/master/dev.key > /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/dev.gpg
echo "deb http://apt.flussonic.com/branch/sapsan/master repo/" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/flussonic.list
apt update
apt install --install-recommends mcaster

The package owns the whole installation surface:

The package pulls in the streaming engine of exactly its own version and PostgreSQL. The base sapsan.service unit is taken off such a machine: exactly one process must run. The products are mutually exclusive — Mcaster and Catena do not share a machine.

Licence¶

Without a valid key the process does not start. The key is asked for during installation and written to /etc/mcaster/license.txt; for unattended rollouts it is fed in through debconf-set-selections or the LICENSE_KEY variable.

A key is issued for a product: the box declares itself as mcaster, and a key issued for another product will not fit it — no activation is granted, and that is visible in the log immediately rather than through a feature that does not work.

Leaving the question empty is allowed: the package installs, but the service stays in failed. Put the key into the same file and run systemctl start mcaster.

PostgreSQL¶

Mcaster is a control installation, and it keeps its state (streams, machines, statistics, journal) in PostgreSQL. The post-install creates the mcaster role and database, generates the database and administrator passwords and writes them into /etc/mcaster/secrets.env:

DATABASE_URL=postgres://mcaster:...@127.0.0.1:5432/mcaster
EDIT_AUTH_PASSWORD=...

A package upgrade does not rotate the secrets. To move the database onto a managed cluster with backups, change DATABASE_URL and restart the service — Mcaster applies its schema itself at start, there is no separate migration step.

Ports¶

Out of the box HTTP port 80 comes up — an initial value that holds only until listeners are set in the panel. After that the ports belong to the machine's settings and are edited there.

Outgoing destinations occupy no ports: a push opens its socket itself.

Multicast needs attention to routes. Ingest is a group subscription (IGMP/MLD) on the interface where the group arrives; egress is the outgoing interface and TTL choice on the destination itself. On a machine with several network cards both choices are made explicitly, otherwise the packets leave into the wrong network.

Running in Docker¶

The product image is flussonic/mcaster: the shared runtime plus the Mcaster interface and the product tag. It needs PostgreSQL, a licence key and a persistent state directory:

docker run -d --name mcaster \
  -e DATABASE_URL=postgres://mcaster:mcaster@db:5432/mcaster \
  -e EDIT_AUTH_LOGIN=admin -e EDIT_AUTH_PASSWORD=secret \
  -e LICENSE_KEY="$LICENSE_KEY" \
  -p 8081:80 \
  -v mcaster-state:/var/lib/sapsan \
  flussonic/mcaster:latest

The media protocol ports that the stream settings turn on are published here as well. The state directory must survive restarts: it holds the machine identity and the activation.

Check¶

systemctl status mcaster
journalctl -u mcaster -n 50

Next is the Quick start: logging into the panel, the first multicast taken in and the first delivery destination.