Setting up an external media store in Carousel

We’ve had a few customers running Carousel with a lot of videos, or just really bug signage systems. They have run into a problem of running of out disk storage for Carousel’s media directory on their base installs. I’m going to show you how to move the media directory and re-configre Carousel to use it.

Carousel stores all media assets (bulletins, videos, sounds) is it’s media directory. It’s at: [Installdrive]:\TRMS\Web\Carousel\Media

What we are going to do to move this media store is:

Copy the Media directory to another drive (mounted drive, not a share!!)
Verify Windows permissions on the new Media directory
Configure the Web UI and Carousel service to use the new path
Configure IIS to use the new path
Test it

I’m going to move the Media directory from the original path to a new drive. The new path does not need to be the same as the old path.

**This needs to be an actual drive, not a mounted network share!**

Get the security properties on the new media directory and verify that the Carousel web application pool will be able to read and write to this dir.

Then we can configure Carousel. There are two .config files we need to modify:

[Installdrive]:\TRMS\Web\Carousel\Web.config
[Installdrive]:\TRMS\Services\Carousel\TRMS.Services.Carousel.exe.config

These fles can be opened and modified with Notepad, or the text editor of your choice. We will need to find the ‘MediaDirectory’ key, and change it.

**Unfortunately, the two app configs are a little different, so pay close attention!**

For the [Installdrive]:\TRMS\Web\Carousel\Web.config file:

Find:
<!–<add key=”MediaPath” value=”D:\Some\Other\Path\To\Media\Folder\”/>–>
Change it to:
<add key=”MediaDirectory” value=”X:\Media” />

For the [Installdrive]:\TRMS\Services\Carousel\TRMS.Services.Carousel.exe.config file:

Find:
<!–add key=”MediaDirectory” value=”D:\Path\To\Media” /–>
Change it to:
<add key=”MediaDirectory” value=”X:” />

Where the value is your new media path. The service automatically appends the ‘\Media’ to the end of it’s MediaDirectory value, that is why the paths need to be different.

You will need to restart the Carousel service after making this change.

Next we need to configure IIS to have a new virtual directory that points to the new media location. We can open up the IIS management counsel, expand the web sites and find the Carousel web application. Right click on it and create a new Virtual Directory. We will make sure to name it ‘Media’ and point it at our new media directory path.