Darwin Streaming Server

[slaphost]

This topic is covered previously but we're in a new era.

Plesk 8 and Darwin 5.5
I loaded and unpacked the -linux version and ran

./Install

Everything feeds back that it was successfull and I can verify that Darwin Steaming Server is Listening on several ports. All the other posts say this is all that's nevessary, and it 'just works' (like every other Apple Product - Apple Rules)

But I cannot connect to

<ip>:1220

as I am told that I should be able to.
Is there anything in Plesk 8 or maybe DSS 5.5 that's not normal and needs adjusment?

 

[phoenixisp]

First things first - are you behind a firewall? Is port 1220 open to traffic?

 

[slaphost]

I am at home accessing from behind a NAT Router. I could Port Forward 1220 if necessary.

 

[slaphost]

I wanted to write up the steps that it took to get everything up and running. Yes, I actually got DSS running on Fedora Core 2 which is set up as a VPN running the PLESK / Virtuoso server admin.

I grabbed the Linux build 5.5 from Apple.com unpacked and ./Install just fine and dandy. I was informed after having no luck getting to the DSSAdmin ip:1220 that 5.5 doesn't work with FC2.
I searched in vain for a 5.0 build until I just tried to alter the version number in the URL to the current LINUX build. IT WORKED! Thanks Apple, do not remove the prior builds and source packages!

./Install and everything reports fine. No errors,
netstat -l -n -p -t -u -w
reports the /perl is LISTENING on port 1220
and the are many entries for DarwinStremi

I was able to SSH into the box and run lynx ip:1220 and navigate through. I was content with doing this until I went to assign the Broadcaster Username and Password. There is no place to add the username. I can change the password all day long, but what is the username. So I had a lot of fun guessing at that. In the mean time I learned that I was able to modify the
/etc/streaming/streamingadminserver.conf file and ad
bind=xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
That had an effect, but it did not work. Right now it's commented out, so it wasn't necessary.

I altered the /usr/local/sbin/streamingadminserver.pl there are 3 instances of 1220 being defined as the port. I changed those to 8080 another number that I knew was open and available. It's worked perfect ever since.

In trying random things to get this working I discovered the in the QT Broadcaster when I am supplying the network address I need to add :8000 to the end of the url. I don't know if this is common or a bug.

So I'm able to administer, but no luck using QuickTime Broadcaster as I need to supply a username and password. I know something is different because instead of just giving me a connection failure message, I get a pop up to enter the username and password over and over.

Then I discovered the command qtpasswd username
Type that and it will ask for the password. Then in the directory that you are going to stream files from you need a qtaccess file. Kinda like .htaccess but with no dot in front.

Inside your qtaccess file you need:
<Limit WRITE>
require user "username"
</Limit>
require any-user

No quotes. It would be AWESOME if the web admin did this for you, but that's the fun of LINUX.

It was a joyous moment when after a week of research, trial, forum searching, source compiling, 3 versions installed (4.1.3 as well), that I clicked broadcast and it was LIVE!

Still had some tweaks to make, I soon realized that by serving the .sdp file directly to people RealPlayer would open and try to connect. I don't know why but this would crash the server. I would have to reboot, still do infact if someone where to crack into my solution.
From QT Broadcaster you can save as a self-contained movie. Doing this puts the feed into a .mov file. When I open this file in QT Pro and look at the movie properties I cannot see any direct link to my .sdp file, but it's there somewhere because no matter where I launch this .mov it connects to the stream. And if forces people to use QT.

So that's it in a nutshell. I wanted to share this and hopefully fill in a blank somewhere for someone going through this. Also to hear if there are any improvements to this method.