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It seems Adobe finally realized that there's a significant Debian user base for their Flash Media Server and started to build "unofficial" Debian support in FMS (the "unofficial" means that the FMS scripts -install, startup, shutdown- still skip a few steps in case FMS runs on Debian). The installation is pretty much straightforward, no problems at all. It even checks for the availability of the libnspr4 library (and stops if does not find it) and creates the fms user and group for you (however I still suggest to create these manually since you want to have these in the system UID/GID range) and sets up automatic start on boot. The libnspr4 lib can be installed via apt-get install libnspr4-0d, the fms user and group can be created via addgroup --system fms; adduser --system --group fms and for the autostart to work right, you'll have to adjust the start/stop runlevels in /etc/init.d/fms after the installation finished and reset the runlevels of the fms script via update-rc.d fms remove; update-rc.d fms defaults (by default the /etc/init.d/fms script does not include runlevel 2 in the start runlevels and Debian's default runlevel is 2).

Adobe made sure that regular users have a hard time if they try to download the Reader installer. The website allows only to install the app through it's Download Manager. However what if the download manager simply fails? In my case it did and no workaround seemed to work. There's however a small "backdoor" which allows you to get the offline installer after all. Change the UserAgent string of your browser to some non-Windows variant (there're extensions for Firefox to do this) or use a non-Windows PC to download the Adobe Reader installer. Instead of popping up the install window of Download Manager, it'll give you the real thing (the offline installer EXE).

Munin is a great open source monitoring program available for a number of platforms. Flash Media Server (FMS) is a streaming server from Adobe aiming mainly at video playback in Flash applications (video players, video conference solutions, etc.). There was already a Munin plugin for FMS (monitoring the number of active connections) at MuninExchange, but the config parameters were hard-coded (in the plugin code) and it lacked documentation on usage and did not match the structure of standard Munin plugins. I've rewritten the plugin to come up for all these shortcomings. The new version of the plugin is available both attached to this post and at MuninExchange.

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.

Whenever I open a PDF in Adobe Reader 8, the Updater kicks in in the background and most of the time it would never exit. I just opened a PDF (no problem there) and after I quit from Reader, I wanted to trash the PDF file. However Finder told me no go since some app is holding on to that file. It turned out to be the shitty Updater. Enough is enough, I turned to Google to get rid of that.

There are a couple of gotchas with this setup. Eg. I wanted to install it on an Opteron and the installer reported that the platform is not supported.