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Wowza Server

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Wowza Server
Wowza Case.jpg
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;
2TB VOD;
3TB 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

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 SKIP TO STEP # -- 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!!![1]

**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

  1. https://www.wowza.com/docs/server-specifications-for-nvidia-nvenc-and-nvidia-cuda-acceleration-with-wowza-transcoder