Friday, July 06, 2012

Microsoft Expression Encoder Problems with Smoothwall/Squid proxy

This might save some headaches for somebody else who's been struggling to get Microsoft Expression Encoder Live streaming to work from an intranet to a cloud/Internet server.

Here's the two problems and solutions:

1) Expression Encoder triggers Linksys firewall DoS (denial of service) rule and blocks the HTTP POST from the encoder to the server. Turn off DoS checking.

2) Smoothwall uses the Linux Squid web caching proxy server, this interferes with long HTTP POSTs needed by Expression Encoder. Maybe setting the maximum block size to huge might work but turning off web caching definitely works.

Finally, we kept caching enabled so that our internal network stays zippy and used another port (8080) on our Azure cloud server to push streams and bypass the cache. 6 hours + 3 guys to fix this.