How To Install The Mumble VoIP Server to Redhat/Centos

Mumble is an opensource, low-latency, high quality VoIP voice chat software that is primarily intended for gaming. It's a free and worthy (often consider superior) alternative to more widely used software such as Teamspeak or Ventrilo.

Mumble's server component, known as 'murmur', is not provided in rpm format for easy installation to Redhat or CentOS server. The software is also not provide by the default or common third party yum repositories. However, installation can be done using a static binary package that is available.

Download

Before we can extract needed files, the lzma compression tool must be installed. This can easily be done using yum.

yum install lzma

Now, both the static binary package and an RPM from another Linux distribution must be downloaded to the server.

wget http://sourceforge.net/projects/mumble/files/Mumble/1.2.3/murmur-static_x86-1.2.3.tar.bz2/download
wget ftp://rpmfind.net/linux/Mandriva/devel/cooker/x86_64/media/contrib/release/mumble-server-1.2.2-3mdv2011.0.x86_64.rpm

Extract and Install Executable

Next, the murmur executable must be extract from the static binary package and installed into the server's PATH.

tar -xjf murmur-static_x86-1.2.3.tar.bz2
cp murmur-static_x86-1.2.3/murmur.x86 /usr/sbin/murmurd

Extract and Install Service Script and Config

To obtain a init startup script as well as a default config file, the downloaded rpm must be extracted.

rpm2cpio mumble-server-1.2.2-3mdv2011.0.x86_64.rpm > file.lzma
lzma -d file.lzma
mkdir mumble-rpm
cd mumble-rpm
cpio -imv --make-directories < ../file
rm ../file


The extracted files can now be moved into the system.

cp etc/mumble-server.ini /etc
cp etc/rc.d/init.d/mumble-server /etc/rc.d/init.d
chmod a+x /etc/rc.d/init.d/mumble-server


Next, a system user for murmur must be created and assigned to required directories and files.

upadd -g 4000 mumble-server useradd -g 4000 -G mumble-server -s /sbin/nologin -d / -M mumble-server mkdir /var/lib/mumble-server chown mumble-server:mumble-server /var/lib/mumble-server
mkdir /var/log/mumble-server
chown mumble-server:mumble-server
/var/log/mumble-server

Starting Mumble Server

Due to difference between Redhat/CentOS init scripts and the distribution the extracted RPM was built for, we must modify the installed init.d scripts

Execute:
nano /etc/rc.d/init.d/mumble-server

In nano editor, type CTRL+\ to bring up the search and replace tool. Search for the text 'gprintf', and replace with 'printf'. Select 'A' to replace all instances, then CTRL+o to save, and CTRL+x to exit.

The mumble server can now be started.

service mumble-server start

You may now connect your mumble client to your server using your server's IP and the default mumble port.

Run at System Boot

To have mumble server start at system boot, simply add the init script to the run level with ckconfig.

chkconfig --add mumble-server
chkconfig mumble-server on