VM Mail Server / Shoutcast Streamer

[tenmei]

Yep - If the subject line seemed odd to you, I'm thinking of building a *nix box with a couple of virtual machines. The first machine will be a Zimbra mail server. The second will run Shoutcast, (Icecast maybe?) to stream the signal from a radio station to a streaming host server.

Details:
1) I have an existing ZCS installation in Fort Worth, which I am migrating to another machine here. I've done a cold copy (6.4 GB) of opt/zimbra/ , TGZ'd that and copied it here to the sunny Caribbean island of Roatan. *whew*
2) I have successfully run a test of Winamp on Win XP and was able to stream the radio signal, but typical crashes convinced me going *nix was a better choice. We uploaded 48kbps mono and got good reports from listeners in Texas, Georgia, Alabama, New York and England. If fact, the internet version sounds better than our radio broadcast!
3) We are resource poor here. The most I've been able to acquire at this time is a 384K synchronous cable connection. Don't know if it goes down more or the power goes down more, but we're down a lot. I'm thinking that if I can manage to run a couple of VMs on one machine, this will allow me to use only one computer and we're hardware poor, did I mention?

Questions:
The current ZCS installation is Ubuntu 6.0.6 LTS. Would another distribution be advisable for the VM host?
I've only used VMWare server in past. Should I stay with that or try something else?
Am I crazy to even be considering this?

[tenmei]

OK - I trust that most people are bypassing the topic because it doesn't make sense, or because they can't type a response while ROFL! or maybe they don't have anything to contribute, who knows.

But yes, this is what I'm trying to do.
At this stage, I'm using Ubuntu 8.04 for the host system, with Virtualbox providing a guest VM for the mail server using Ubuntu 6.06 LTS. If I can make things work, and get direct control of my mail server again, this will be a good thing. At that time I can look at doing long overdue upgrades. Assuming local politics allows me to continue, that is. For anyone who might not have noticed, there's close to a civil war about to happen here. The Honduran President wants to go Chavez and disband Congress and the Constitution and the Courts. Congress and the Courts vocally disagree with that plan, and shooting could break out at any time. Wouldn't it be great if I get my mail server going here and then have to leave the country!!!

[stack]

OK - I trust that most people are bypassing the topic because it doesn't make sense, or because they can't type a response while ROFL! or maybe they don't have anything to contribute, who knows.

Also a lot of people are like me and check every couple of days....er...weeks sometimes :-[

I also have not done anything with Zimbra except a weekend build that I played around with on a personal level.

But yes, this is what I'm trying to do.
At this stage, I'm using Ubuntu 8.04 for the host system, with Virtualbox providing a guest VM for the mail server using Ubuntu 6.06 LTS. If I can make things work, and get direct control of my mail server again, this will be a good thing. At that time I can look at doing long overdue upgrades.

I was going to suggest going to Ubuntu 8.04. I have already upgraded all the Ubuntu servers to it. While I like the newer releases a lot, I prefer my servers to be LTS and Ubuntu 8.04 has been really good to me and the few Ubuntu servers I have.

Assuming local politics allows me to continue, that is. For anyone who might not have noticed, there's close to a civil war about to happen here. The Honduran President wants to go Chavez and disband Congress and the Constitution and the Courts. Congress and the Courts vocally disagree with that plan, and shooting could break out at any time. Wouldn't it be great if I get my mail server going here and then have to leave the country!!!

I have heard, but I didn't know tensions were that high... good luck with all that! Be safe!


~Stack~

[Insanity5902]

I had a Ubuntu 6.06 running Zimbra, started as a 4.10 install, ended as a 5.13 install. I am pretty sure it was a hardware issue, but everytime the system would, the databases would become corrupt. I could manually dump the db, and reload it and browse the data fine, but when zimbra attached on, the database would become corrupt again.

My overall experience with zimbra was good, but I would suggest a good UPS that linux can communicate with, that way you don't have any hard shutdowns, which could cause problems.

I've used VBox to use a WindowsXP testing environment for web design, I haven't ran a system 24/7 on it, but I like it alot.

[Davemon]

Hi!


What your doing is more high end than what I do. I am generally more hardware and general apps oriented.


What I have seen sometimes when testing hardware, using memtest, is that upper memory may be bad. So say you have 2 x 512 sticks O RAM, the upper memory on the 2nd stick may be bad. Corrupting your database.


Just mt 2 cents.




Davemon

[tenmei]

Thanks Davemon. I'd like to get back to what I normally do, which is applications and web programming. Once special projects slow down, that is. I actually have several serious web customers waiting. I believe RAM is good, though not new. I have run memtest from the Ubuntu 8.04 LiveCD. It's a 4-5 year old ECS mobo, Athlon (2400+?) CPU. Shoutcast was crashing every 15-30 minutes but I added a pci sound card instead of the onboard audio and it runs for an hour or more now.

Meanwhile, I have Shoutcast DSP running. Most of the time. Running latest Winamp and DSP plugin on new Windows 2K installation. It locks up once an hour or so, though Task Manager shows minimal CPU or RAM usage, and I am spending a lot of time going through the forums for an answer. The website is under heavy construction, but IF you want to listen, and IF it is running, the link is http://wave101fm.com

How I got there -
Installed Ubuntu 8.04 and installed Virtualbox. Set up Ubuntu 6.06 VM for mail server (chosen because that's the OS and Version I'm migrating from). Tried to set up a second VM for Shoutcasting but was unable, either because of my lack of experience with VB or a setup problem I couldn't find. I spent several long days trying the various options to stream an audio signal using Linux. I tried every different way I could find described on the internet, but couldn't make it work on Linux. So temporarily I'm streaming on Win2K while I put together another box to do it in Linux. Guess I'll go back to VMWare on that one and finally get the mail server going. Maybe ESXi this time.