Post in Democaster - Phase 2 - Request for Server Advice

2005 Nov 21 14:13 UTC

The UK Local e-Democracy National Project has commissioned a modest
effort to turn the Democaster "prototype" into a product for use by
at least five producers by March 2006.

In short, Democaster is designed as an open source oriented, low
cost, audio webcasting with webcam images service for community
groups and smaller government organisations like Parish Councils.
Democaster is for public meetings, conferences and other non-music
public events. Imagine doubling! attendance at a meeting from five
citizens in the room at a meeting with another five listeners. (Low,
low cost helps justify the basic yet fundamental democratic benefit.)

First up is a set of platform tweaks for user and producer usability
and setting up a dedicated server.

I am looking for some advice on what kind of off-the-shelf server(s)
you'd recommend.  Server specs, memory, reliable hard drives, back-up
ideas - all for under $3000 US. Think Redhat Linux for the server,
Icecast2 for streaming, and original programming for the scheduling
and archiving CMS.

We don't imagine high capacity use based on the type of webcaster
this service is designed for - imagine up to 15 producers, 100 hours
of archived content at 32kbps max for both live/on-demand streaming
and on-demand downloading, some jpegs (not video), RSS feeds/Podcasts
of recent webcasts, and live events with up to 50 simultaneous
listeners on the server at any one time.

One load issue is that we automatically convert Ogg encoded live
webcasts to MP3 for on-demand access (and may add real-time
conversion) and vice versa. (We are using Ogg based on the mission of
the project - be as non-proprietary as possible. I'd rather have
producers install Oddcast (a Winamp plug-in) without having to deal
with MP3 license issues and third party download sites for the LAME
encoder ... then convert for broad access on the server.)  So we
might use two servers working together.

What are your thoughts?

Cheers,

Steven Clift
Democaster Lead

P.S. I'll be coming back to you for more advice.  The more questions
you can help me answer, the more resources we will have available for
programming.