As part of my Rails Rumble team prep, I wanted to document the quickest way to get a Red5 Flash media server up and running on a virtual private server. The Rails Rumble project will actually be using a Linode cloud server, but since I already have a Slicehost account, I did this experimentation on Slicehost.

1. First fire up a new server on Slicehost (even though it’s not LTS, we’ll use Ubuntu 9.04). 
   After the server is provisioned, ssh in as root.  For simplicity, I’ve done this entire
   exercise as root.  Obviously on a production server, you’ll want to create the necessary
   non-root account.
   
   
2. Next let’s get our server up to date and necessary repos added. 
   If you are already root, you won’t need the ’sudo’:
   
       sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list
   
   
3. Add this line to the end of your ’sources.list’ file:
   
       deb http://za.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ jaunty multiverse
   
   
4. Now run this series of commands from the shell. This will bring Ubuntu
   up to date with the latest patches, etc. Also it will install some useful
   shell tools like locate to help you quickly find files on the filesystem.
   
       apt-get update
    apt-get upgrade
    apt-get install locate
    updatedb &
    apt-get install htop wget screen telnet subversion
   
   
5. Now install the necessary Java packages and the Ant build tool:
   
       apt-get install java-package
    apt-get install sun-java6-jdk
    apt-get install sun-java6-jre
    apt-get install ant
   
   
6. After you have run through the install steps, you can test the success of the
   install by checking where java was installed and which version is recognized:
   
       root@red5Test:/etc/apt# which java
    /usr/bin/java

    root@red5Test:/etc/apt# java -version
    java version "1.6.0_13"
    Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.6.0_13-b03)
    Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 11.3-b02, mixed mode)
   
   
7. You can do this as a non-root account, but I built Red5 with Ant from the root account.
   After the build completes, copy the build output into /usr/share.
   
       cd ~
    mkdir temp
    cd temp
    svn co http://red5.googlecode.com/svn/java/server/trunk red5

    export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun-1.6.0.13/
    export ANT_HOME=/usr/share/ant/

    cd red5
    /usr/share/ant/bin/ant

    mkdir /usr/share/red5
    cp -R ./dist/* /usr/share/red5/

    cd /usr/share/red5
    chmod 755 red5.sh
   
   
8. Now we can check if Red5 can be brought to life:
   
       /usr/share/red5/red5.sh &
   
   
   We can check with netstat that Red5 is running on the default port of 5080:
   
       root@red5Test:/usr/share/red5# netstat -ant
    Active Internet connections (servers and established)
    Proto Recv-Q Send-Q Local Address  Foreign Address  State
    ...
    tcp6       0      0 :::5080        :::*             LISTEN
    ...
   
   
   And to confirm, connect to port 5080 via telnet:
   
       root@red5Test:/usr/share/red5# telnet localhost 5080
    Trying 127.0.0.1...
    Connected to localhost.
    Escape character is '^]'.
   
   
9. Go ahead and cancel out of telnet. Confirm that the Red5 start page is accessible via a browser by navigating to:
   
   http://[yourdomain]:5080/
   
   You should see this Red5 page:
   
   
   
   
10. At this point, you can watch the really nice YouTube video that the Red5 team has put together which is embedded on this Red5 start page. It will guide you thru the process of installing a couple of demo applications and then testing them… Remember when you are testing the demo apps to change the ip address of the server you are connecting to. If you are using a remote server, it won’t be ‘localhost’ but the ip address of the remote machine.