Event ID 318 — Unicast Logging

Applies To: Windows Server 2008

You can configure Logging plug-ins in Windows Media Services to keep a record, a log file, of client and server activity during a streaming session. Log information can also help:

• Track server usage so that you can decide when you might need to add more resources to your system.
• Assist you in planning your security implementation. For example, if your system is subjected to a denial-of-service attack, log files can help you determine which clients are being used in the attack.
• Identify user-reported issues with your streaming system by providing event codes that correspond to common issues.
• Provide historical data for use in trend analysis and business cases.

For more information, see Logging Model for Windows Media Services.

Event Details

Resolve

Make disk space available for log file storage

To resolve this issue, do either of the following:

• Make space available in the current log directory.
• Change the log directory.

Make space available in the current log directory

To perform this procedure, you must have membership in the local Administrators group, or you must have been delegated the appropriate authority.

To make space available in the current log directory:

1. On the Windows Media server, open Windows Media Services. To open Windows Media Services, click Start, point to Administrative Tools, and then click Windows Media Services.
2. In the console tree, click the Windows Media server or the on-demand publishing point for which you are logging data.
3. In the details pane, click the Properties tab.
4. In Category, click Logging.
5. In Plug-in, right-click WMS Client Logging, and then click Properties.
6. In the WMS Client Logging Properties dialog box, on the General tab, note the log directory path in Currently logging to.
7. In Windows Explorer, remove log files from the log folder to make additional storage space available, or perform the following procedure to specify a new log directory that has sufficient disk space.

Note: By default, the WMS Client Logging plug-in stops logging when the amount of free disk space drops to 10 percent. This prevents the log file from taking up all the hard disk. However, there are some scenarios where it is not realistic to stop logging after this threshold is reached. For example, if a hard disk is 100 gigabytes (GB), the plug-in stops logging when only 10 GB of hard disk space remains free. You can use the Windows Media Services 9 Series Object Model to configure the WMS Client Logging plug-in to stop logging at different thresholds. For more information, see article 812635, "INFO: Supplemental Logging Information for Windows Media Services 9 Series," in the Microsoft Knowledge Base.

Change the log directory

To change the log directory:

1. On the Windows Media server, open Windows Media Services. To open Windows Media Services, click Start, point to Administrative Tools, and then click Windows Media Services.
2. In the console tree, click the Windows Media server or the on-demand publishing point for which you are logging data.
3. In the details pane, click the Properties tab.
4. In Category, click Logging.
5. In Plug-in, right-click WMS Client Logging, and then click Properties.
6. In the WMS Client Logging Properties dialog box, on the General tab, in Directory, click Browse to select a new directory for log file storage.

Note: If you make additional free disk space available in the current log directory, the plug-in will try to log data to the unicast log file immediately. If you change the unicast logging path template to reference another location that has sufficient space for logging, the plug-in will not try to log data until the beginning of the next log cycle period. To begin logging to the new location immediately, click Cycle Now in the WMS Client Logging Properties dialog box.

Verify

To verify that the client logs are being created correctly, test a stream by using Windows Media Player:

1. If you want to test the stream by using Windows Media Player on the computer that is running Windows Media Services, you must install Desktop Experience. For more information, see Installing Desktop Experience.
2. In Windows Media Services, in the console tree, click the publishing point that hosts a stream that you want to test.
3. In the details pane, click the Announce tab, and then, in Connect to a unicast stream, note the value of the URL that a client can use to access the content.
4. Start Windows Media Player on a computer that can access the stream, and enter the URL that you noted in the previous step.
5. Using the Player controls, test the control functionality of the content stream. Broadcast streams can use the Start and Stop commands. On-demand streams can use the Start, Stop, and Pause commands, and the Seek bar.
6. Test all the available streaming protocols. A unicast stream will try to connect by using the MMS protocol, but will switch to the RTSP protocol if network conditions or the Player version requires it. The HTTP protocol is not active unless the WMS HTTP Server Control Protocol plug-in is enabled. For more information, see About data transfer protocols.
7. Allow the stream to play for a representative period of time and check that the stream quality is sufficient for the type of content and the capabilities of the equipment.
8. View the fields in the log file to confirm that they are filled in correctly. For more information, see Log File Entries Reference.

Note: You can use a Globally Unique Identifier (GUID) value created by Windows Media Player to identify the Player connection to the Windows Media server and view the log entries created by the Player that you use in your test environment. The c-playerid field in the log is used to record the Player ID value. To help protect user privacy, the option to send unique Player identification information to content providers is turned off in Windows Media Player. For Player log entries, if the Player is configured to not send this information, the recorded value in c-playerid is: {3300AD50-2C39-46c0-AE0A-xxxxxxxxxxxx}, where x is the session ID of the client. To identify the log entries generated by the Player in your test environment, you can enable the option to send a unique Player ID on the Privacy tab in Windows Media Player. For more information, see the Windows Media Player Privacy Statement.

Related Management Information

Unicast Logging

Streaming Media Services