Wowza Server

Wowza Server

Corsair 540 Tower Case
Active	operational 2015
Location	SETV Main Office - Rack
Architecture	Asus M5A99X EVO R2.0 ATX AM3+ Motherboard AMD FX-8320 3.5GHz 8-Core Processor
Power	650 W
Operating system	Debian Jessie 8 64-bit
Memory	16.00 GB
Storage	120GB OS; 2.8 TB VOD1 3.7TB VOD2; 500GB Backup
Speed	3.50GHz (peak)
Purpose	Wowza Streaming and VOD server

The Wowza Media Server is what is used by the Springfield SETV office to broadcast our live streams online, and provide Video-On-Demand (VOD) content to our users.

Device Build

Component	Type	Notes
CPU	AMD FX-8320 3.5GHz 8-Core Processor	Cooling: Coolermaster Hyper 212 EVO
Motherboard	ASUS M5A99X EVO Rev.2.0 AM3+
Memory	Corsair Vengeance 16GB DDR3-1600	2x8GB
Storage	Intel 530 Series 120 GB 2.5" SSD	(/dev/sda) Operating System & Wowza Install Root
	Seagate Barracuda 2TB 3.5" 7200RPM HDD	(/dev/sdb) Wowza VOD, Live, FTP, WowzaShares
	Hitachi Deskstar 7K3000 3TB 3.5" 7200RPM HDD	(/dev/sdc) Wowza OS and VOD Backup Drive
Video Card	PNY Quadro K4000
Case	Corsair Air 540 ATX Mid Tower
PSU	Corsair RM 650W 80+ Gold Modular
Optical Drive	ASUS DRW CD/DVD Writer

Operating System

The chosen operating system for the Wowza Server is Debian 8 64-bit, Codename Jessie. The reason this was chosen was because Linux, overall, is a more stable webserver environment. It is also free compared to RedHat and Windows IIS. Due to it's open-sourced nature, support is only as good as your troubleshooting and Googling.

If all is lost, and you need to start from scratch, visit Setting Up Wowza for the First Time.

Ajenti

There is a web-based management panel installed on the Wowza server. It is a free, open-sourced control panel and is a bit limited. It's purpose it to help aid in managing certain settings from a comfortable GUI. The other purpose it to graphically see the status of all important hardware components.

To access this panel, from the school's network only, go to http://wowza.ssdcougars.tv and click "AJENTI PANEL"

Wowza Software

The streaming software we use is called Wowza Streaming Engine. The control panel backend is called Wowza Streaming Engine Manager. Users use the WSE Manager to administer common Wowza settings. Below we will go over the basics of starting, stopping the Wowza Service, Upgrading, and troubleshooting streams.

Wowza Streaming Engine
Wowza Streaming Engine/Manager

Backups

The primary OS and all of it's contents are backed up to /media/osbak

The system uses rsnapshot and a cron job to execute it every night.

This backs up the critical files, to a partition on the backup drive. The other partition is the off-line backup for the VPS server.

If the system needs to be rebuilt, use setv as the main user, rebuild from scratch, then copy back the/usr /root /bin /etc folders.

Notes to Consider

Shell Access

Shell access (SSH) has been highly secured. All access attempts to port 22 are blocked except from whitelisted IPs.

All IP's under 10.130.0.0/16 are whitelisted, meaning any computer on the SSD Network should have access to the SSH port.

To modify the Whitelist, use the monitor connected to the machine (or use PuTTY with X11 forwarding and Xming) launch firestarter and click the Policy tab

You can add or remove rules within Firestarter - Leave Ajenti, FTP, HTTP, HTTPS, 8088 and 1935 ALONE! Do not touch these.

All SSH access is authenticated by Certificate. If you lost the cert, you will have to learn how to make a new one for SSH, convert it to a .ppk for PuTTY.

Certs are located on the Archive drives.

Black screen on reboot, videos don't play, cannot sign in via Monitor (CAN sign in via SSH/PuTTY)

Check your disk space, chances are during a reboot it did not mount the backup drive for VOD2, which is networked. If a network mount is not ready in time for the backup rsnapshot job, then it will default create the folder under /media/vod2bak regardless of successful mount. Thus filling the primary OS drive with VOD2 backup data.

To remedy this:

1. SSH into Wowza or Console in at machine (CTRL+ALT+F6)
2. Sign in as Root
3. Issue command df -h and determine the size of / (If / % available is 0, you know the drive is full.)
4. Issue command umount /media/vod2bak
5. Issue command, again df -h ENSURE THAT YOU DO NOT see 10.130.12.192:/mnt/WowzaVOD2BAK/VOD2BAK ON THAT LIST, IF YOU DO GO BACK TO STEP 4 -- OTHERWISE, IF YOU IGNORE THIS AND ISSUE THE NEXT COMMAND WHILE 10.130.12.192:/mnt/WowzaVOD2BAK/VOD2BAK IS CONNECTED YOU WILL DELETE THE ENTIRE ARCHIVE!
6. Issue command: cd /media && rm -rf vod2bak
7. To confirm this worked, issue df -h again and confirm that / does not =0%
8. Reboot shutdown -r now

Notes to add

fstab

nvidia-smi and it's special love with wowza

Setting up nvidia on this and work with wowza is... a pain in the ASS!!! Follow Wowza's guide. I KNOW it goes against Debian's published best practices, but this is what works.

****NOTE**** THE LATEST COMPATIBLE DRIVER IS 367.27 ANYTHING LATER WILL NOT WORK!!!

**NOTE** AS OF 11/02/2017 NVIDIA VERSION 384.59 is WORKING CORRECTLY, AND IS REQUIRED FOR GNOME TO WORK CORRECTLY

setting up SSH access, using PPK and PuTTY

users

FTP public, private, management

Ajenti

rsnapshot

common commands for shell