Installing Flash Media Server 3 on Debian

There are a couple of gotchas with this setup. Eg. I wanted to install on a Debian 4.x server and the installer reported that the platform is not supported.

To get over this, you've to start the installer with an option:
./installFMS -platformWarnOnly

The installer script was written for RedHat and it's not 100% compatible with Debian. It complains about a missing /sbin/chkconfig binary. This is not a big problem since it would only set the /etc/init.d/fms script to start automatically during every reboot. In Debian you can do this after the FMS installer finished with this:
update-rc.d fms defaults

You're not done yet, because the FMS components miss a couple of shared libraries. to be exact, the following:
  • libnspr4.so
  • libasneu.so.1
The libnspr4.so can be installed with the libnspr4-dev package, thus issue this command: apt-get install libnspr4-dev

The libasneu.so.1 is provided by Adobe and it's already in the FMS directory (eg. /opt/adobe/fms). We only have to make sure the shared lib is available to the FMS apps. For this you've to create a file (eg. adobe_fms.conf) in /etc/ld.so.conf.d and put in it the path to the FMS directory. Now regenerate the dynamic linker run-time bindings by executing ldconfig.

Check whether the above change was successful by executing ldd /opt/adobe/fms/fmscore and looking for a line like libasneu.so.1 => not found. If the lib was found by ldd than you're all set.

FMS should run fine from here. You can start it with an invoke-rc.d fms start manually or reboot the server and FMS will be started automatically.

P.S.: note that FMS 3 does not depend on the openssl libs or the crypto libs as FMS 2 did.
P.S.2: if you're a very convenient person, you might want to give a shot to the installer patch made by Markus Bertheau. The patch merely alters the installer script to accept Ubuntu as a distro (you won't have to use the -platformWarnOnly option) and adds a few Ubuntu/Debian specific changes (like automatically creating fms user and group and also adds the update-rc.d fms defaults way of autostart configuration. However the library dependency resolution still remains a manual task.

Comments

Comment viewing options

Select your preferred way to display the comments and click "Save settings" to activate your changes.

FMS 3.5

The -platformWarnOnly option is no longer necessary for running the installer (installFMS) on a non-RedHat platform. apart from that, the procedure is pretty much the same.

"killall" in server script fails

to run the invoked "server" and "adminserver" scripts by /etc/init.d/fms you need to install a package that contains the "killall" lib.
After "aptitude install psmisc" the scripts are working fine.

Re: "killall" in server script fails

Thanks for pointing that out. I always install psmisc as one of the first packages after an install-from-scratch, so I forgot that it was not there by default. I think this package should make it into the base packages that Debian installer puts on your system automatically.

Just for note (it is not needed by FMS): the other similiar package is procps which is not in the "core" dependency tree ... I mean no other "basic" package depends on it. It is automatically installed by the Debian installer as part of the base system packages, but if you install a system _really_ from scratch (not using the Debian installer, but hand picking every single package), then you should keep in mind that procps is pretty much a must have since it contains utilities like kill that is used by most standard init.d scripts (and actually all sorts of scripts).

Syndicate content