TeamSpeak is a free software which allows you to communicate (vocally) with your friends. This tool is as easy to use as it is to install.

This tutorial is also available as a ScreenCast.

It is strongly advised to launch TeamSpeak from a non root user. Therefore, we shall start by creating a user. Of course, you could also use a suitable user you had already created (more here about managing the users on your server):

adduser teamspeakuser

Which will give us this:

Having provided the password and logged in as this user (teamspeakuser from root), let's go into his homedir (by typing the command cd/home/teamspeakuser/) and fetch the TeamSpeak archive (the address given here is valid at the time of writing, but we're relying on the community to keep it up to date!):

wget ftp://ftp.freenet.de/pub/4players/teamspeak.org/releases/ts2_server_rc2_202319.tar.bz2

We now need to decompress this archive :

tar -xjf ts2_server_rc2_202319.tar.bz2

The server is ready to work!

Go into the server's folder

cd /home/teamspeakuser/tss2_rc2

You will find something which looks like this (with the ls - la command)

However, a key folder is missing: server.log
It will be generated during the first launch of the server, and will be essential from then on.

Let's launch the server :

./teamspeak2-server_startscript start

Which will give us this message :

If we list our folder again, we'll find 6 new files including the infamous server.log

Let's have a look at this one :

cat server.log

The essential information contained in this file are in the following two lines :

Those are the passwords for the admin AND the superadmin for the server. Of course, every installation of TeamSpeak generates a different password when it is first launched. That is why server.log didn't exist at the beginning of the setup.

You can also type the following command to display the passwords :

./teamspeak2-server_startscript passwords

With these informations, we are going to be able to connect to the TeamSpeak web interface.

No need to have Apache, MySQL, PHP or the like, TeamSpeak is a genuine StandAlone!

In your favorite web navigator; type in the url which corresponds to the IP (or the domain name if you have a DNS configured), plus the port specific to the TeamSpeak administration interface, which is 14534. For instance :

http://217.70.190.13:14534

You will come to an interface of this sort:

You will prefer the superadmin interface which will allow you to switch to the admin's later (working your way down, as it were) :

From this interface, you will be able to edit your server, add users, create new servers etc… But that would be a different tutorial altogether :)

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