I am at a heart a hacker, and this can cause problems when I overlap with people wanting enterprise solutions.
The specific problem^H^H^H^H^H^Hchallenge we’re working through is that our library wants our university repository to be able to deal with modern formats like video and audio, and process these into standard streamable formats like .flv, however the libraries to do all this are not available in the RedHat Enterprise current releases. These issues occur almost any time research-led tools need to cross the line into central university fully-supported solutions.
The enterprise team don’t want to install custom libraries, as this means they have far more testing to do when maintaining the server. We initially thought the issue was about their support contract with RedHat, but it’s not, it’s about being able to guarantee service for the university repository, which is considered an “Enterprise” application.
I initially thought that a second server running Fedora with all the libraries which periodically scp’d files needing converting from the main server, converting them, and then putting them back via scp. That way if the server with more recent libraries goes down, the core service stays up. I was surprised that this wasn’t very helpful to them, as while it reduced the theoretical risk to merely losing format conversion, they would be required to add the configuration of the Fedora server to their set of supported machine images to test and patch. They didn’t want to do this lightly, as it’s a notable investment.
The other thing I learned is that it’s far less hassle for them, if the Enterprise Linux server is installed with statically linked libraries to make these fancy features work. This effectively makes them part of the application, rather than part of the OS, and reduces their testing burden.
While their priorities are a little alien to me, the are understandable when they are explained. It’s useful to understand how they work, so we can keep future plans as low-impact on them as possible.
Anyone else got similar experiences, or useful advice?
Statically compiled ffmpeg and mencoder should provide all you need. I can’t see them being too concerned about the installation of those…
btw, flv doesn’t really make any sense as a container format these days
encode one .mp4 and one .ogg and then serve it up as with a flash-player fallback (which can handle a .mp4 source fine)
http://camendesign.com/code/video_for_everybody
That I didn’t know! Thanks for the tip, it’ll make life easier.
The critical detail which wasn’t obvious to me, given my experience is all in a more research led environment, is how much difference it made to them for it to be statically compiled.
Actually, I’ll consider that for our own systems too, rather than right to install incompatable RPMs.