Cluster - Nginx VOD server

Hi all,

I’m trying to understand how the Nginx VOD server is working inside a cluster installation.

Did this node has to be publicly accessible ? Or only accessible from the other nodes of the cluster ? When a media is embedded on a 3rd party site, do the Nginx VOD server node takes directly the hits, or is it routed through the front node(s) (or through the ssl offloading load balancer in my case).

I did not find any explanations in the cluster documentation about that.

Many thanks.

Hi @luca.guindani,

The Nginx node must be accessible from any device you wish to perform playback from.
That said, just like with the front nodes, you can have one or more Nginx nodes behind an LB and of course, again as with the Apache nodes, SSL offloading can be done.
This way, only the LB has to be available to the outside world and the nodes behind it do not have to be directly accessible.

Look here for a detailed explanation of the Apache and Nginx configuration:

Of course, the MySQL kaltura.delivery_profile table must have corresponding records, this is also explained in that post.

Hi @jess,

Thanks for your answer and explanation, I get it now.

Is it possible to have the front nodes working with ssl (like I said through an ssl offloading load balancer), but have the Nginx VOD nodes without ssl ? What would be the issues with this kind of setup (I’m not sure we can get an other vm in front of the Nginx node(s) as load balancer) ?

Hi @luca.guindani,

It’s possible BUT, if you embed a player on a page loaded over HTTPs and it tries to play a video using HTTP, the browser will block it. This is what’s called ‘mixed content’…

Ok thanks @Jess, I’ll try with a single Nginx VOD node with SSL for now (if it’s not enough, I can always add a LB in front of the VOD node(s) in the futur).

The thing that made me think this server was not accessed directly was in the cluster documentation I did not see any cmds to install the NFS client like in some other nodes (/opt/kaltura/bin/kaltura-nfs-client-config.sh). Is it something missing from the doc ? Don’t we need a NFS mount for this kind of node also ?