[Freeswitch-users] Stumped by mod_portaudio permissions issue

[Mark Haun]

Anyone?  I thought this might elicit some interest from the developers.  Is
no one using mod_portaudio anymore?

Mark

Mark Haun [haunma at keteu.org] wrote:
> I built freeswitch version 1.7.0+git~20150730T192909Z~ab7f83c654~32bit for
> my ARM-based home server (an NVIDIA Jetson board), with the intention of
> using mod_portaudio with a wireless USB headset for my main home phone.  It
> works well when running freeswitch directly as root, but when I configured
> freeswitch to run at system startup, mod_portaudio could no longer find any
> audio devices.
> 
> No problem, I thought, it's a simple permissions issue.  I am using the
> example debian init script from the wiki (this is a Jessie install with SysV
> init rather than systemd).  It runs freeswitch as user freeswitch, group
> daemon using the -u and -g command-line options.  So I added "freeswitch" to
> the audio group, then used sudo to verify that I could play sound files with
> "aplay" as the freeswitch user.  That worked, but it did not solve the
> mod_portaudio failure.
> 
> Thinking there must be an issue with portaudio separate from ALSA, I fetched
> and built the "pa_devs" utility which enumerates and prints the available
> audio devices.  (This is basically what mod_portaudio is doing on startup.)
> Running as the freeswitch user, that worked too.  Hmmmm.
> 
> I tried running freeswitch from the command line using sudo rather than the
> -u and -g options, i.e.
> 
> $ sudo freeswitch /usr/local/freeswitch/bin/freeswitch -nc
> 
> and that worked as well!  Then I started experimenting with -u and -g and
> discovered that
> 
> $ /usr/local/freeswitch/bin/freeswitch -nc -u freeswitch
> 
> allows mod_portaudio to load correctly, whereas
> 
> $ /usr/local/freeswitch/bin/freeswitch -nc -u freeswitch -g daemon
> 
> causes mod_portaudio to fail.
> 
> Can anyone explain what's happening here?  In both cases the process UID,
> GID, EUID, EGID, FUID, and FGID are the same (freeswitch:daemon) as
> displayed with "ps xao pid,uid,gid,euid,egid,fuid,fgid".  Could this be a
> bug in freeswitch?  There are a couple of threads from 2-3 years ago in the
> archives, where mod_portaudio permissions issues were never resolved and the
> solution remained a mystery.
> 
> For the time being I guess this (not using -g) is a workaround, but I'd sure
> like to understand what is going on.
> 
> Mark
> 
> _________________________________________________________________________
> Professional FreeSWITCH Consulting Services: 
> consulting at freeswitch.org
> http://www.freeswitchsolutions.com
> 
> Official FreeSWITCH Sites
> http://www.freeswitch.org
> http://confluence.freeswitch.org
> http://www.cluecon.com
> 
> FreeSWITCH-users mailing list
> FreeSWITCH-users at lists.freeswitch.org
> http://lists.freeswitch.org/mailman/listinfo/freeswitch-users
> UNSUBSCRIBE:http://lists.freeswitch.org/mailman/options/freeswitch-users
> http://www.freeswitch.org
>