Latency and especially high latency is one of the main problems when it comes to real time communication between a client and a server, so we decided to do some testing that would ultimately tell us which of the 3 main media-servers (AMS, Wowza and Red5) can achieve the lowest latency. The Testbed The testing was done using our flagship product, AVChat 3, for both client and server side as application. The client side of AVChat was installed on a local machine in Romania. The local machine has the following processing and memory specifications: Intel i5 CPU @ 3.30Ghz and 8 GB of RAM, on a Windows 7 x64 OS. For the media server I’ve used a VPS located in[…]
Category: Research
Real-Time Communication Without Plugins WebRTC stands for Web Real-Time Communication, and it is a peer-to-peer communication technology for the browser, that enables video/audio calling and data sharing without additional plugins. WebRTC started as an effort by Google, to build a standard real-time Media Engine into all the available major browsers, and is now supported by Google, Mozilla and Opera. The API and underlying protocols are being developed jointly at the W3C and IETF. Similar attempts at implementing peer-to peer communications over the web have been made before by Adobe through their acquisition of Amicima in 2006 and subsequent Flash Player 10 (October 2008) and 10.1 (June 2010) releases. Somehow the peer-to-peer technology in Flash Player never took off. The guiding[…]
You probably find out find that your server is being attacked by brute force SSH attacks, port scanning, viruses scanning for the ability to spread, things like that or for some other reason you want to block a specific IP on your server. In this article, I’ll show you how to block an IP address on Linux server using IPTables. First, I’ll assume you are already using iptables. You can check that using this command line: iptables -V Second, you have to create 2 shell script files in /etc/init.d folder. So go in the folder with cd /etc/init.d and create the first file: vi blockip.sh press “i” paste this script inside #!/bin/bash #blocking iptables /sbin/iptables -A INPUT -s $1 -j DROP #saving iptables /sbin/iptables-save > /etc/sysconfig/iptables save the[…]
Google has released on June 18 2013 Chrome version 27.0.1453.116 for Windows, Macintosh and Chrome Frame platforms that addresses a huge vulnerability issue with Flash Player. This issue is a specific type of clickjacking now known as camjacking, and it basically tricks users into pressing the “Allow” button in the Flash Player Settings window. This issue has been fixed by Adobe since October 2011, but somehow it could still be leveraged in Chrome to hijack web-cams and microphones. A proof-of-concept (not safe for work) (Chrome only) was developed by security researcher Egor Homakov @homakov to explain this exploit. This issue was first reported by @typicalrabbit in a blog post on http://habrahabr.ru of which the translated version can be found here. The proof shows a slide-show of pictures with girls,[…]
These days we faced some annoying spam attacks on our forum and had to take some security measures that will share with everybody here. As first quick measures: 1) You have to ensure that the registration page contains at least a “Questions and answers challenge” and a CAPTCHA code. For those who don’t know, this area can be found in the AdminCP under the menu System->System Settings->Security and Privacy. We used to have re-captcha from Google before, but the bots were still getting in, so we switched to “Are you human PlayThru” to see if something changes. Here’s a graphic of user registrations due the past months where we can notice abuse of users registered: 2)[…]
“I’d like to know if I can run other Red5 instances on my server, besides the one that AVChat requires.” This is an issue that came recently for some of our existing customers and I thought that we can share this info to everybody. It happens that you have been using a software that requires Red5 to transmit data and you have installed, for example, Red5 0.9. Good.. Now, after you got an AVChat license, you heard that the only compatible versions of Red5 with the chat software are 0.8 and 1.0 RC1. This made you wonder if you can still use your previous software running on the same Red5 0.9 as before and make a different installation of[…]
Hello everybody, Over the Internet there will always be someone who might want to harm your website’s activity just for fun or for some material reasons. We’re writing this article in order to help our AVChat customers who are getting spammed. Here are the steps that you can do in order to prevent future incidents. 1. Search for logs and look for his or her IP In case you’re not online while the user is spamming so that you can see his IP in the chat: if someone notifies you by e-mail, you can take a look over the TEXT CHAT TRANSCRIPTS and search for the desired username and find his IP from time to time, you can also take a[…]
The Puffin browser for iPad seems to be running Flash applications pretty well. Here are some shots with it running AVChat: Login screen shows up and the flash background, I can also type a username that is remembered. Good job so far! Sending messages works as well. The rooms list: Quick conclusions: text chat works fine with slight delay you can not start your webcam or mic even tough it detects that you have a microphone you can join several rooms and switch between them notification sounds do play (new message, private cam request, buzz, etc.) you can view someone’s cam but it will show a frozen frame not a video (even tough the download graph shows you downloading a[…]
You want to find out what version of Red5 is running on your server? There are a few ways: 1) Look at the Red5 welcome page on port 5080. To see the welcome page just go to http://yourred5server.com:5080 in your web browser. It’s not the most accurate but it’s the fastest and you don’t need access to the Red5 installation. Here are the welcome screens for different versions. Red5 0.8 welcome page: Red5 0.9.1 welcome page: Red5 1.0 RC1 welcome page: 2) Look in docs/changelog.txt Look in the Red5 installation folder/docs/changelog.txt . You will immediately see the Red5 version there: 3) Pay attention to the Red5 startup log During startup, Red5 will show the Red5 version, here is where to[…]
We’ve made a little test today with the latest version of AVChat (1059) which has some optimized media server file for Red5. 1) We’ve installed Red5 0.8 on an old Toshiba M70 laptop with these specs: Pentium M 1.7Ghz (FSB:400Mhz with 2Mb of 2nd level cache) 1G DDR2 RAM 60GB HDD @ 5400rpm 100Mbps Intel network card Ubuntu 10.04 LTS which is connected to our LAN via wire. 2) Once Red5 was up and running on the laptop, we used an internal flash app named “AVChat Virtual User” to create load on the Red5 server! This app creates a lot of virtual users, once each user is created it connects to the avchat30 app on the media server. Once connected […]