[Icecast] creating a station from the ground up

[David Saunders]

What to start a server from the ground up?

     First off the most impotent thing you need is upstream Bandwidth,
 it don't mater how good your equipment is, your bandwidth is the most
impotent part of building a icecast server.  First decide on how many
streams you want to host (the speed of them),  Our main streams are
low quality audio stream, like old time radio sometimes :)  But we are
talking it for audio announcements of sports events :)  So we can
expect 42 users per 1/M upload speed on the line.  We were able to
handle about 90 users on the 2 cable modem lines,  and we rented
overflow servers.  Now on Fios, 30M/30M we expect 1200+ listeners.  On
the same servers.  Once you  found out what kind of bandwidth you have
to work with you can think about stetting up your server :)

   I would recommend a computer that 2 t o3 years old :) It don't have
to be a modern computer.   Our servers been running several years now,
and they where bough as used business machines off of ebay then. (for
about 500 USD each)  We have a pair of them because we had 2 cable
feeding the servers. Since then we have updated to a FIOS connection
and happy with that.  And changed one server to the streaming server
and the other to an audio archive server.

Next a operating system.. Well i would recommend linux , which one, we
are using fedora on ours, but I have personal one running on debian.
Why i recommend this over windows?  Well you have to reboot a windows
server every now and then, our servers have 3 months on them and only
was rebooted cause of OS updates. The drawback to this is, you may
have problems knowing how to sftp into the server and edit the
icecast.xml file.

Also for servers, you can rent streaming servers depending on what you
need done. In hte days before we had fios we rented up to 3 remote
servers, only because they would limit the number of mounts you could
have on them at a time.

Now for a stream encoder. This is the client ran on the users computer
to source the stream. Well you can use most of hte modern mp3 players,
many have icecast server capacity.  We recommend setting up the edcast
server for our clients. its simple to set up and runs in windows.


 Well that it in a nutshell.  I maintain the server for our service.
Basically i fix them if they break. Which is due to an update or
something i do. :)

 biggest thing in setting up a servers is the bandwidth for most people. :)

David