How to Host DCS SRS in AWS

How to Host DCS SRS (Simple Radio Standalone) in AWS

Hi Folks,

SRS is a fantasic piece of software that can be used alongside DCS for voice communication that is also an immersive radio simulation. I was recently asked if I could do standalone hosting for it. The main beneifts I can see from hosting SRS in AWS is that it will have it's own internet connectivity - which can help since voip applications are particularly sensitive to network conditions, as well as being able to pick a central hosting location since SRS is still a client server architecture and not peer to peer. I think people might find value in an accesible rr style turn key solution, but due to the nature of SRS being just a small exe it's arguably fairly straight forward to roll your own with just a startup script, which I'm happy to detail here.

User data

User data is the name AWS gives to parametrisation of instances including scripts to run on startup. This enables starting SRS in AWS with just a user data argument with a standard AWS Windows image. This user data script just turns off windows firewall (to make the SRS ports 5002 TCP/UDP accesible), downloads, unzips, and then starts SRS.

<powershell>
Set-NetFirewallProfile -Profile Domain,Public,Private -Enabled False
$WebClient = New-Object System.Net.WebClient
$WebClient.DownloadFile("https://github.com/ciribob/DCS-SimpleRadioStandalone/releases/download/2.0.8.2/DCS-SimpleRadioStandalone-2.0.8.2.zip","C:\DCS-SimpleRadioStandalone-2.0.8.2.zip")
Expand-Archive C:\DCS-SimpleRadioStandalone-2.0.8.2.zip -DestinationPath C:\DCS-SimpleRadioStandalone-2.0.8.2
C:\DCS-SimpleRadioStandalone-2.0.8.2\SR-Server.exe
</powershell>