newbie understanding of diff components.
  • Hello:
    Im working on deploying campcaster at our new student radio station. I
    believe I have misunderstood campcaster's architecture and am hoping you can
    straighten me out. He is a scary picture of what I am facing:
    http://docs.google.com/View?id=dp42pmj_184f68bnchn (ignore the
    winamp/windows graphic at the bottom. that is our current system).

    First our network environment.

    1. We are on a university campus and are bound by their security policies
    - namely all services that are accessible from the Internet must be in the
    DMZ and machines in the DMZ can not access the LAN.
    2. Our transmitter is remote from our studio. About a 3/8 of a mile, but
    is accessible via the campus LAN. I am trying to avoid broadcasting through
    a telephone line. This no room... or place for a mixer board ect....
    3. We have initiatives to produce our own shows.
    4. We want to broadcast live shows from off-campus.
    5. We only have one FM transmitter, but we are interested in several
    Internet streams of diffent formats.... so multiple stations.

    How I think/want campcaster to fit:

    1. The firewall is an issue for us. I want our studio on the LAN but for
    campcaster-station web gui to be access able off campus, it must be in the
    DMZ. So campcaster-sation could not talk to campcaster-studio, but
    campcaster-studio can talk to campcaster-sation. (also, we have three
    computer science students that are going to work on drupal modules using the
    campcaster API... we want the webservice to be on the Interent).
    2. I had hoped that campcaster-station would interface with the DAC and
    transmitter but that the campcaster-studio workstations communicated
    directly to campcaster-sation (over the LAN in a different building).
    3. I had hoped to free our broadcast workstation running
    campcaster-studio for productin use when were are not broadcasting live, so
    I had anticipated campcaster-sation to run on a separate machine than
    campcaster-studio.
    4. I had hoped we could run campcaster-studio in live asist mode at
    off-campus events (ie communication to campcaster-station over the Internet
    rather than the LAN). I expected to use a SIP trunk or Darkice off the
    roaming laptop.
    5. I am intending to use Ubuntu with ebox for a general purpose
    "workgroup server". I would like store our library and archives on this
    machine. Should it run campcaster-store? Could it host the web gui for
    campcaster-station?

    The problems... at least some of the ones I have identified:

    1. Firewall between campcaster-station and campcaster-studio. I was
    holding my breath that the network connections would all be initiated by
    campcaster-studio since the firewall let the LAN into the DMZ, but
    installing station separate from studio produced errors. It seems like the
    modules in the 1.4b3 debs are expecting to be on the same machine.
    1. we might be able to mod the firewall policy in our case, or this
    may not matter.
    2. we could but everything in the DMZ
    2. It appears that both cc-station and cc-studio need connections to
    the transmitter. cc-studio does not play through cc-station.
    1. we could deploy a PulseAudio sink at the transmitter (and use this
    for our FM Internet stream) and set up our cc-station and
    cc-studio to out
    on PulseAudio.
    2. we could do a remote desktop with freenx to get our desktop gui
    with live assit and then use SIP trunk (or PusleAudio) off the
    production
    workstation (or roaming laptop) to bring the studio audio back to the
    cc-studio
    3. It appears that cc-studio needs installed with sation, so useing
    that machine for audio production may be difficult.
    1. the freenx option above?
    4. off-campus broadcasting.
    1. the freenx option above?
    5. It does not appear that cc-store wants to be split from cc-station,
    but we can still mount NFS or Samba shares off ebox.
    1. If we have multiple cc-stations, do they all access the NFS share
    or should they go through the cc-hub?

    Thank you for what is bound to be brilliant insights and clarifications of
    the obvious Very Happy

    br, tom
  • 2 Comments sorted by
  • Did you get any sort of answer to this? I am looking at installing this and I am looking at your questions five months later. I am just checking the level of support for this product. Thanks Red
  • Vote Up0Vote Down Micz FlorMicz Flor
    Posts: 184Administrator
    hi tom, hi red,

    we are in the middle of restructuring our development. campcaster has been on ice - or on hold as it turns out - for quite some time. from the 1st of may 2010 we are back on track and have more muscle to put behind the development.
    if you are still following the development (we moved from phorum to fudforum), please say "beep", so we can contact you.

    all the best, micz