Centova Cast v2 on FreeBSD

Question:

Does Centova Cast v2 work with FreeBSD?

Answer:

While Centova Cast v2 is not "officially" supported under FreeBSD, we have a number of users who have reported success in doing so, and we have made a number of changes for better compatibility with FreeBSD based on their recommendations.

The following information may be of use to you when installing and using Centova Cast under FreeBSD.

Pre-installation

Centova Cast's installation script requires bash. As such, you'll need to install bash, then edit Centova Cast's install.sh script and change the first line from:

#!/bin/sh

...to:

#!/usr/local/bin/bash

If bash is installed in a different location on your machine, please adjust the path appropriately.

Post-installation

By default, Centova Cast depends on the /proc filesystem, which is not always present (and, to the best of our knowledge, is not present by default) under FreeBSD. There are two ways to correct this:

Option 1: The most reliable approach to resolving this is to have your system mount the /proc filesystem automatically each time the machine boots. This can be accomplished by running the following commands:

mkdir /proc
echo "procfs /proc procfs rw 0 0" >> /etc/fstab
mount /proc

Once you've done this once, /proc will always be mounted automatically at boot time.

Option 2: Alternatively, if you have specific objections to using the /proc filesystem (as some administrators do), you can add the following to /home/centovacast/system/config.php instead:

define('PORTABLE',true);

Note that this mode is less-tested, however, and thus is not necessarily recommended. Enabling the /proc filesystem provides an environment very similar to Linux, which is very well tested with Centova Cast and is less likely to contain undiscovered bugs.

Aside from the issues above, our clients have reported that Centova Cast works out-of-the-box under FreeBSD with no further changes.

NOTE: This article is for Centova Cast v2 only; an alternate version exists for Centova Cast v3.