R Consulting Media Storage (mds) Appliance Configuration

Apply all necessary steps from R Consulting Appliances Installation, Initial configuration checklist.

Media Storage Appliance configuration checklist

Configure media content volumes:
1. Create data volumes depending on Media Storage’s target use; refer to Brief disks, partitions and filesystems reference section below, if necessary;
2. Enlist all data volumes in /etc/rc.conf.d/datamount (or /etc/rc.conf) by adding a sequence of datamount_volN, subsequently indexed entries, each listing the respective device/partiton; for example: datamount_vol1="da0p1", datamount_vol2="gpt/vol2";
  
  Additional mount options can be provided with datamount_volN_opts and noatime is default, unless explicitly set to NO.
  
  Volume concatenations (or spans) are created by setting value to concat:<glob-pattern>, for example datamount_vol2="concat:gpt/seg??" will concatenate all partitions with GPT labels segXY, like seg01, seg02, seg03, etc.
Select which service goes to which volume, by adding respective keys to /etc/rc.conf.d/datamount (or /etc/rc.conf):
1. datamount_hls to be set to the name of volume, where HLS timeshift to be kept; for example: datamount_hls="vol1"; a magic value, "AUTO" can also be set and in this case all volumes will be scanned for respective service directory (in this particular example, diractory named hls);
2. datamount_pvr, datamount_timeshift, datamount_vod, datamount_wwwcache and datamount_mediastore work the same way;
3. datamount_hls_live, datamount_timeshift_index and datamount_scratch specify the RAM drive size to use for respective feature; a reasonable value for datamount_scratch is 1G, unless there are multitude of HD variants; other values depend on the number of channels to be provided by the server: 4G for datamount_timeshift_index, 16G for datamount_hls_live, are not uncommon;
4. To apply changes run service datamount start.
Be sure to list IP addresses of all Transcoder Appliances in /etc/rcons/hls-sources.list.
(Optionally) enable CORS, required for HLS playback on some devices; create /usr/local/etc/nginx/local.conf.cors.conf:
```
map $http_origin $cors_origin {
    default "";
    "~^https?://provision.tv.acme.com(:[0-9]+)?$" "$http_origin";
}
```
and replace provision.tv.acme.com with TV service address’ domain.
To enable HAC access create /etc/local/nginx/local.conf.acl.conf:
```
map $remote_addr $ws_binding {
    default $site_dflt_binding;
    192.168.100.20 management;
    192.168.100.30 interconnect;
    192.168.100.40 cache;
}
```
where
- management is for Application servers and allows users and sessions query and management,
- interconnect is for HACs,
- cache is for dumb caches.
Remember that host’s own addresses also have to be listed if HLS to MPEG-TS gateway is in use.

Brief disks, partitions and filesystems reference

To list connected disks/volumes run geom disk list;
To manage volumes on a RAID controller use mfiutil(8), storcli, MegaCli or respective utility for the installed controller;
To list partitions run gpart show [<device>] or gpart show -l [<device>], to include partition names, instead of their types;
To initialize a new disk/volume run gpart create -s gpt <device>;
setup-storage custom utility can create and initialize partitions ans spans:
```
setup-storage vol1 <device>
```
or
```
setup-storge span <device1> <device2> ...
```
To create a new partition run gpart add -tfreebsd-ufs -a1M [-s<size>] <device>; check gpart(8) for advanced use;
To initialize a filesystem run newfs -L<name> -jU <node> for hard drives or newfs -L<name> -tU <node> for SSDs; check newfs(8) for advanced use;

ZFS

To set-up ZFS on a storage server:

zpool create -m none -o autotrim=on tank raidz /dev/diskid/...
zfs create -o mountpoint=/srv/vol1 -o atime=off -o quota=7.5T tank/vol1
zfs create -o mountpoint=/srv/vol2 -o atime=off -o quota=7.5T tank/vol2
zfs create -o mountpoint=/srv/vol3 -o atime=off -o quota=7.5T tank/vol3
sysrc zfs_enable="YES"

Resources

R Consulting, support@rconsulting.bg,
R Consulting Appliances Installation