SqueezeCenter is reliable and doesn't seem to need maintenance, so
fiddling seems to be entirely optional. Have had 3 SBs for about 2
years, with 2 SS/SC installs in that time.
Have cumulatively spent 24 hours of fiddling (OS and hardware issues,
SS/SC has never needed significant work) and about 922 hours of
listening (according TrackStat), or a 1:38 ratio. I expect this to
improve significantly over the next few years (or until I outsource SC
entirely).
VIRTUAL MACHINE
The first was a virtual machine, which took about 6 hours to set up and
tweak (CentOS 4 on VMWare ESX, SlimServer v6.5). Most of that time was
spent evaluating various SS plugins. I didn't bother messing around (or
updating) it for about a year-- just dropped in additional music using
CIFS/SMB.
STANDALONE SYSTEM
As my library grew it consumed all the available storage on the VM
server, so I needed a separate system to run SC7. This took much longer
as I wanted it to be
- Fanless: getting hardware to run this way is much harder than for a
normal system
- Automatically suspend/hibernate when not in use: needed to learn
SS/SC CLI, discover hardware specific power management quirks
- Install of SC7 itself required nearly no time at all: yum install
squeezecenter (used same plugins as my previous install)
- CentOS 5 with readonly-root and scripted build (also evaluated
FreeNAS+SlimNAS, but was not satisfied with lack FreeBSD support for
Wake on LAN or usable ACPI power management)
Needed 2 (mostly fun) weekends of concerted hacking to make my
standalone system work (about 18 hours), but have not done anything to
it since March. SqueezeCenter is somewhat like Asterisk in that it can
be endlessly tweaked and modified, but doesn't actually need the
attention.
FUTURE
I want to outsource SC in the future and expect there will be a $20 VPS
with cheap storage (or hosted SC service) by the time I am in the market
for this again. (I hope) Nobody buys SB/Duet systems for the pleasure of
installing and maintaining a local SC instance.
--
syburgh
------------------------------------------------------------------------
syburgh's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=14239
View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=48751
_______________________________________________
discuss mailing list
discuss@lists.slimdevices.com
http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
