Starting in the late hours of Thursday night, and most of Friday (I was on vacation) I struggled to get the Darwin Streaming Server to work on my LinuxPPC server.
It was painful to build - not due to any problem with the source code, but the build scripts are full of errors. I found most of the solution on a Japanese Linux discussion board. Years of Japanese study finally pays off in finding Linux technical support solutions! Even with the suggestion from Japan, there were still a few installation bugs to overcome.
After I installed the DSS, and formatted my movie for streaming, I had a nice streaming movie working on my local net. Later, I discovered that outside my firewall the movie could not be seen. Trying to solve that problem was what took most of Friday, and led me through a lot of info on Linux Firewalls. I've played with Linux Firewall configs before, but the syntax of the iptables tool can be pretty obscure, not to mention that a thorough familiarity with TCP/IP, UDP, ICMP, etc would have helped greatly. Nevertheless I configured and reconfigured my Firewall, and roped in various friends lurking on iChat to help test.
Finally, in frustration, I turned my firewall off completely, and still the streaming would not work. It was quite mysterious.
The solution to the problem was a silly mistake in an uxpected place. When I hacked up my html file that would contain the streaming movie, I used the static IP of my server on the interface to the local network (the LAN). That's why it worked fine when testing inside my LAN. But the IP numbers I use on my LAN are in the reserved range that are not for use on the internet. The actual IP of my server on the internet interface is completely different number (assigned by my Internet Service Provider.) - and on the net, one is supposed to use a domain name.
So, I put the server's domain name in the html source link for the movie and now it works.
Hours of research and experimentation were all spent attempting to resolve a firewall issue that did not exist. Simple HTML was the only problem.
Time wasted? Maybe. I learned a lot more about Firewalls, I feel the satisfaction of overcoming an obstacle, and I can now stream any videos I care to put up on my server (and I've got the camera to shoot them.)
7:21:36 PM 
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