Tips for Installing Flash Media Server on Amazon's EC2

Last night I installed Flash Media Server on an Amazon EC2 server. While the instructions are for the most part helpful, I did run into a couple of unusual snags:

1. Despite what I thought I read in the docs, Flash Media Server apparently requires a 64bit system. When I attempted to install it on a 32bit system, I received an error about 'i686' not being a valid architecture. This is easy enough in Amazon - just fire up a 64Bit server and move on with life. Still, I could have done without losing the time spent configuring the 32bit system.
2. I used the standard Amazon AMI: Basic 64-bit Amazon Linux AMI 2011.09 (AMI Id: ami-7341831a) to start my instance. When running the installer it complained about a missing libcap library. A quick check using rpm -qa | grep libcap showed that the library was indeed installed. However, with a bit more investigation I learned that the binaries that come with FMS require version 1.0 of this library. I ran: sudo yum install compat-libcap1 to install this library, and the install proceeded as expected.
3. Although the documentation tried to warn me about how an Apache instance comes with FWS, I didn't quite get that (I assumed it would work with installed Apache server). Your best bet is to avoid installing httpd on the server altogether (the Basic AMI doesn't come with it, so just don't bother installing it). That way, you won't run into issues with one instance of Apache stealing the port from another instance.
4. For the FWS demos to properly work, you'll want the following inbound ports open in your security group: 80 (for http), 1111 (for admin) and 1935 (for rtmp - live video).

Other than those gotchas, the install went smoothly. And more importantly, I'm quite impressed by FWS's capabilities. There was a time when this sort of video integration would have been a herculean effort. Now it's just a matter of writing some ActionScript.