I love communications. I love facilitating communication. That’s one of the reasons that I installed IRC on my server.
I didn’t stop at IRC, though! Now I have a fully functioning Ventrilo server as well! For those who don’t know what Ventrilo is, it’s a Voice over Internet Protocol service much like Skype is. Except, it’s a very good group chat mechanism where Skype is a little more cumbersome for group chats.
Ventrilo was surprisingly easy to set up. All I needed to do was download the server files, extract them, make a few minor configuration changes, and then run the server. It was trivially easy.
What was more difficult to do was to configure the server to run in a jailed environment. Similar to the IRC service, I’ve set up the Ventrilo server to run in a chroot jail so that if it were to ever be compromised or hacked-into it wouldn’t endanger the rest of the system. It took me a little while to figure out the proper chroot command to get this to work, but I was able to get this to work properly and I’m very happy with the results.
As a side note, the Ventrilo server was, by default, configured to run with an audio codec that isn’t very compatible with most client programs. It’s easy enough to reconfigure with the default configuration file, however, and there are plenty of options to choose from. I was able to resolve that issue just by reviewing the documentation and following the commands listed.
Anyway, Ventrilo is up and running on the box now! We’ll see if it causes any system instability as we move again.