TechNote (Archived)

Flash Communication Server installation tips for Linux

Linux installation issues and tips

Installing the Flash Communication Server on a Red Hat Linux machine is covered in the "Installing Flash Communication Server" documentation, on page 13. Therefore, with a little knowledge of UNIX (preferably of Red Hat Linux), installing Flash Communication Server for Red Hat Linux is a simple task with these instructions, and most of the default values are fine.

This TechNote addresses some questions users may have before installing Flash Communication Server, and this TechNote is complementary to the "Installing Flash Communication Server" documentation. The instructions discussed in this TechNote will cover all three different Flash Communication Server editions - Developer, Personal and Professional Editions.

Before installation:

Which Linux server is supported?
Installation directory
License key
Sample files directory
Who should run the Flash Communication Server?
Which library files are needed?

After installation:

After Flash Communication Server is installed
How do I login to the Admin server?
System start-up/kill scripts

Which Linux server is supported?
Flash Communication Server for Linux only supports Red Hat Linux version 7.3 and 8.0. This means that Flash Communication Server has been tested only on these two versions of Red Hat Linux. It is possible that Flash Communication Server will work on newer versions of Red Hat Linux but it was never tested and is not directly supported. However, we have modified the Flash Communication Server installation script to include the support for Red Hat Linux 9 and Red Hat Enterprise version 3 WS (code name taroon). If you must install Flash Communication Server on either Red Hat Linux 9 or Red Hat Enterprise version 3 WS, you can download a copy of the installFCS which has the support; otherwise, you cannot install Flash Communication Server by using the installFCS from the CD or from the tar file.

Installation directory
Linux servers by convention, install most third-party software into the /opt directory, and most vendors will select to install their software into the /opt directory as well. Flash Communication Server is no exception to this convention. By default, the Flash Communication Server will be installed into the /opt/macromedia/fcs/ directory. Flash Communication Server can be installed in any directory you wish. However, it is recommended that it should be installed in /opt/macromedia/fcs/. If the /opt directory does not exist on the system, it can be created. Usually users would create a symbolic link to an existing directory or a newly created directory. To create the /opt directory, follow the commands below:

# cd /usrÂ
# mkdir optÂ
# cd /Â
# ln -s /usr/opt/ optÂ

Note: In order to create a directory or symbolic link where the directory is owned by a root user, you must execute su - root and enter the root password unless the system is configured to use sudo. The pound symbol (#) indicates that the UNIX shell prompt for user root, so do not enter the # symbol. This will create the opt directory in /usr directory and then create a symbolic link from /opt to /usr/opt. You can think of the /opt as a short cut to the /usr/opt/ directory.

License key
During the installation process, the install script will prompt you to enter the license key. If you have the license key handy, you can enter the license key. Otherwise, you can enter the license key after the installation completes. For Flash Communication Server's Developer edition (a FREE version of Flash Communication Server for testing and learning purposes only), a license key is not required to run Flash Communication Server. For Personal and Professional Editions, license key is necessary. To enter the license key if the license key was not entered during installation, do either of the following:

Launch the admin.swf (see "How Do I login to the Admin server?"), login into the Administration Console of Flash Communication Server, then enter the license key and restart the Flash Communication Server.
Edit the Server.xml file located in /opt/macromedia/fcs/conf using either the vi editor or any text editor. The line that you want to edit is approximately on line 93 and is displayed as follows:
<LicenseInfo></LicenseInfo>

Add the license key in between the tags, as such:

<LicenseInfo>FCS123-45678-91011-12131</LicenseInfo>

Save the file and restart the Flash Communication Server.

Sample files directory
Flash Communication Server comes with some sample applications. If you are planning on installing the sample applications, be prepared to enter the directory where the applications can be accessed via the Web browser, such as, http://www.MyDomainName.com/fcs/samples/SampleApp/SampleApp.html. If you are deploying Apache Web server, consult the httpd.conf (Apache configuration file) for the directory where the Web server serves files for your website. The install script will automatically create a fcs directory under the web root of your Apache server. For example, if the Apache's document root is set to /var/www/htdocs, you would specify /var/www/htdocs when prompted to enter the directory where the sample files should be installed, and then the install script will create a folder called fcs under /var/www/htdocs. You should not specify /var/www/htdocs/fcs, because the install script will create two fcs folders as such /var/www/htdocs/fcs/fcs.

Who should run the Flash Communication Server?
During the installation, it is necessary to login into the system as the root user and perform the install. After the install process is complete, the Flash Communication Server should be started by a non-root user. Usually this user would be the user that runs your Web server. By default, Apache Web server runs as the user apache and group apache. If your system uses Apache Web server and runs as apache user, you would use this account to run your Flash Communication Server. However, you can use a different user for security reasons, but we do not recommend using the root user. If you wish to add a brand new user and group, follow the steps below:

# groupadd fcs (this will create a group called fcs and the system will assign the next largest GID for group fcs.)
# useradd -g fcs fcs (this will create a user called fcs and assigned the group fcs to this user and the system will automatically assigns the next UID after the last entry in the passwd file.)

If you want more control of the GID and UID, you can manually assign these numbers but you have to know which GID and UID are safe to use so that they do not conflict with existing GIDs and UIDs. To create group and user with assigned GID and UID, use the following steps:

# groupadd -g 1000 fcs
# useradd -u 1000 -g 1000 fcs

Which library files are needed?
One of the procedures that the installed script checks is if your system has all the valid library files. During the execution of the script, if your system does not have all the necessary library files that the script needs, it will fail and it will exit. By default, the script expects the library files to be in /usr/lib/.

During the install process, if the install script tries to detect one of the library files and does not detect the file, it will display the following error messages:

./fcsconfig: error while loading shared libraries: libstdc++-libc6.2-2.so.3: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

This error means that this library file is missing from the system. This file is actually a symbolic file to libstdc++-3-libc6.2-2-2.10.0.so. To resolve this problem, if the libstdc++-3-libc6.2-2-2.10.0.so file exists in /usr/lib/, you would need to make a symbolic link to this file as follows:

# cd /usr/libÂ
# ln -s libstdc++-3-libc6.2-2-2.10.0.so libstdc++-libc6.2-2.so.3

The above command will create a symbolic link and named it libstdc++-libc6.2-2.so.3 as the installed script expected. If the libstdc++-3-libc6.2-2-2.10.0.so cannot be found on the system, a copy of the RPM can be found on one of the Red Hat ISO install CD's or it can be downloaded from http://at.rpmfind.net. The RPM that it requires is compat-libstdc++-7.3-2.96.110.i386.rpm.

After Flash Communication Server is installed
After the Flash Communication Server is installed, to start up the server, if the server was not started up automatically upon the completion of the installation, it can be manually started. Before starting up the server, make sure you are still logged in to the system as root. Follow these steps to get your server started:

At the UNIX shell prompt, change to the /opt/macromedia/fcs directory by entering cd /opt/macromedia/fcs
Note: If you have installed Flash Communication Server to the /opt/macromedia/fcs directory, this is correct; otherwise, enter your installation directory.
enter ./server start

To start up Flash Communication Server's Admin server, try the following step:

enter ./adminserver start or ./fcsmgr adminserver start

To start up Flash Communication Server's server, try the following step:

enter ./server start or ./fcsmgr server fcs start

To check if these services have been started up successfully, follow the steps below:

enter ps -auxw | grep fcserver
(fcserver is the process of the Flash Communication Server)
enter ps -auxw | grep fcadmin
(fcadmin is the process of the Flash Communication Server's Admin server)

To shutdown both the server and the Admin server, follow the instructions below:

enter ./server stop
(Stop the Flash Communication Server)
enter ./adminserver stop
(Stop the Flash Communication Server's Admin server)

How do I login to the Admin server?
All the necessary help files and the admin.swf which allows you to login to the Admin server are located in the Flash Communication Server installed directory, which is by default is in /opt/macromedia/fcs/flashcom_help. If you have access to the console of the Linux server, you can launch the Mozilla browser and browse to the /opt/macromedia/fcs/flashcom_help/html/admin directory and open the admin.swf file. Opening admin.swf requires the installation of Flash player 6 for Mozilla browser on Linux. Flash Player 6 can be downloaded from Macromedia Web Players. An alternative solution to opening the admin.swf file on the Linux server is to FTP a copy of the admin.swf to a machine running Windows or Macintosh operating system and launch it in the browser which has Flash Player 6 support.

System start-up/kill scripts
After the Flash Communication Server is installed, there are start up and kill scripts that were installed during the installation. These start-up and kill scripts are used by the system to start up or kill the Flash Communication Server automatically upon system reboot. The kill scripts are used by the system to shutdown the Flash Communication Server processes during the system shutdown. It is very important for users to answer "yes" to the question which requests that the system should start up Flash Communication Server automatically during the installation. The start-up scripts can be found in /etc/rc3.d and /etc/rc5.d with a script named S81fcs and the kill script is located in /etc/rc2.d with a script named K81fcs. All these scripts are all symbolically linked to a script called fcs in the /etc/init.d directory. The installation also creates several directories and files in the /etc directory, called macromedia,fcs, and services, which are subdirectories of macromedia. In the services directories there are two files called fcadmin and fcs.

Additional information
For details on Windows installation, please refer to Installing Macromedia Flash Communication Server (TechNote 16446) and for more details on Flash Communication Server uninstallation, refer to How to manually uninstall Flash Communication Server (TechNote 16468).