Apr 2020

The standard appliance that we supply for MediaKind Encoding on Demand is a G8 Server. While a very capable server, it only has 240GB SSD installed. Not enough room to store lots of source and encoded files.

This is not a problem because the environment that an On Demand Encoder is used will have some kind of network storage. This storage is accessed by the Encoding on Demand to both receive and output any files that the server is working on.

If you however want to do some testing, and don't have any network storage, then you can use the internal drive, but it does have some pitfalls, and you need to know what you are doing.

First thing you need to know is where to create your storage directories, have a look at the two file systems below from two different servers: (you can get this view by typing df -h at the console).

  Filesystem               Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
  /dev/mapper/centos-root   50G  4.9G   46G  10% /
  devtmpfs                  16G     0   16G   0% /dev
  tmpfs                     16G   12K   16G   1% /dev/shm
  tmpfs                     16G   43M   16G   1% /run
  tmpfs                     16G     0   16G   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
  /dev/mapper/centos-home  381G   42G  339G  11% /home
  /dev/sda1               1014M  145M  870M  15% /boot
  tmpfs                    3.2G     0  3.2G   0% /run/user/0

  Filesystem                   Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
  /dev/mapper/vg_main-lv_root   66G  4.6G   58G   8% /
  devtmpfs                      94G     0   94G   0% /dev
  tmpfs                         94G   16K   94G   1% /dev/shm
  tmpfs                         94G  2.9G   91G   4% /run
  tmpfs                         94G     0   94G   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
  /dev/sda1                    488M   75M  378M  17% /boot
  /dev/mapper/vg_main-lv_opt    66G  1.8G   61G   3% /opt
  /dev/mapper/vg_main-lv_var   220G  115G   94G  56% /var

On the first example, the bulk of the free space is on Centos-home (so /home) so any folders/files must exist under this directory.

On the second example, the bulk of the free space is on var (/var) so any folders/files must exist under this directory.

Using the first example where our free space is mostly located at /home, we can create some directories.

First I will create a MEDIA directory under home. Navigate to the home directory (cd /home) and then create the MEDIA directory (mkdir MEDIA).

Now I want two more folders, sources and output. Navigate to the MEDIA directory you just created (cd /home/MEDIA) and create the two folders (mkdir sources and mkdir output).

Navigate back to the home folder (cd /home).

We now have to ensure that the Encoding on Demand product has rights to read, write and create files and folders. The way to do this is to grant ownership of the folders we just create to the On Demand software (it is granted to a built in user).

From the console/home directory use chown -R ericsson:ericsson /home/MEDIA. This will grant ownership of the MEDIA directory, and all directories in MEDIA to the user ericsson.

Thats it, you should now be able to put source files in /home/MEDIA/sources and the On Demand software will create output files/directories in the /home/MEDIA/output directory.