Design
RSS’s integrated multimedia service allows organizations to display advertising, photo libraries and audio/video training media, movie/photo libraries or similar via wifi or wired connection to any streaming video device (such as a television or ‘streaming stick’ like Roku or FireStick or the like). Also this enables a person with general wifi/net/remote access but nothing else– like a mobile phone, laptop or even desktop to ‘just play’ the company-public materials.
In short: connect a TV to wifi and as all recent TV’s do– with Upnp/DLNA — it’s ready. No admin activity, no elevated file database access, ‘plug-in-and-go’.
This streaming service provides yet another ‘middle ground’ in the RSS security architecture, so that designated files can be provided without imposing administrative account creation burdens, and without having to give elevated resource / database / file system / network access.
See the sections to the right for details as to the graphical user interface involved in selecting the files for multimedia sharing, and the related technologies.
- Integrated Subsystem:
- Gerbera DLNA/UPnP media server, with GUI administration. Natively integreated into RSS and layered atop the high availability file storage system, the Gerbera media server permits an admin to designate any combination of files and/or whole directory contents with media related files (photos, movies, audio) to be available to any network connected device. Screenshot. General information. Details.
- Foundational Subsystems:
- Ceph – “The future of storage”. Updated annually since 2012, among many other things: stores client information on not fewer than three servers– only one of which need be operating to continue operations. General Information. Details.
- Host OS: ALMA Linux (Redhat/Centos successor) running on ‘bare metal’ and/or virtual machine/KVM – Even the smallest RSS client supports no fewer than two separate administrative subsystems simultaneously running each in a virtual machine as part of a physical server. Should only one be running, administrative services will appear normal. Scales to thousands of users natively. This design protects the overall system from breaches and to allows the installation of the latest administrative subsystem related patches without concern for dependencies and incompatibilities in unrelated subsystems. While ‘docker’ and related isolation technologies provide small speed advantages, virtual machine isolation remains the gold standard for security and is therefore the basis for RSS administrative hosts running as a subsystem on a server. The underlying Linux distribution for the database subsystem is Alma, a successor to Centos/Redhat Linux. Alma Linux General Information, Details. KVM General Information , Details.
- Serves media files in a wide variety of common formats (jpg, mp3, wav, flac, ogg, .aac m4a, avi etc. etc., and transcribes many others into common formats.
- Media is served using the widely deployed DLNA/UPnP protocol. All current “Smart TV” vendors as well as ‘Streaming Stick” vendors have ‘native apps’ that play these. As do Apple, Android, Windows and Linux devices. Partial list of supported devices.
- Note: Media files selected by site admins are available only to those authorized to use the local network or remotely via VPN. To make files available to specific individuals without staff network access, or the general public: see the sharing options un the Groupware feature.
- Admins have the option of designating directories as ‘auto-rescan’, or not. Meaning that if desired, any files added to the directory will automatically be available to all players without further administrative intervention.