[slim] Re: Perfect, I love it
Good. Feeling tuneful correlations with slim figure now. Soon we will be mashing potatoes before big crowd. -- trebejo trebejo's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=730 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=23540 ___ discuss mailing list discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
[slim] Re: Mac Slimserver more resource hungry than Windows?
I was able to get rid of a similar problem by deleting some cache files. Weird little bug. The files in question were ~/Library/Caches/com.apple.preferencepanes.cache ~/Library/Caches/com.apple.preferencepanes.searchindexcache More details at these threads: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=22188 http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=22208 Cheers, Ariel -- trebejo trebejo's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=730 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=23492 ___ discuss mailing list discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
[slim] Re: Remind me what I did about slimserver.log
danco Wrote: > I had just thought of that answer, and was going to suggest it to you. > > I've just found (using the Help Viewer and looking for Spotlight) a > document indicating that most of the Library folder is not searched. That's remarkable. I would actually insist on that as one of the prime directories to search through. Maybe it's a *feature*. Oh well. I suppose that after deleting all that the usual search finds, one can go to terminal and do something like this: $ cd ~/Library $ find . -name \*slim\* \; and take it from there. On a systemwide install, use sudo and go a bit higher (or lower depending on how you define it) in the filesystem. Cheers, Ariel -- trebejo trebejo's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=730 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=23020 ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
[slim] Re: Remind me what I did about slimserver.log
Aha! (User: mazzare) (Dir: ...mazzare/)$ ls -al ~/Library/Logs/slimserver.log lrwxr-xr-x 1 root staff 49 Jan 5 22:27 /Users/mazzare/Library/Logs/slimserver.log -> /Volumes/Gypsy2/Users/Shared/Music/slimserver.log So I *did* do that on purpose. Let's do the easy thing and blame Finder. You go to Finder, type "slim" in its little search box, and it will find everything... except this soft link. I don't know why. Sometimes OS X is not the best unix... -- trebejo trebejo's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=730 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=23020 ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
[slim] Re: Remind me what I did about slimserver.log
Tinkertool! Cool little app, thanks. Naturally, for us terminal users there are no hidden files, as long as we use ls -al. I just ran grep lim .* and grep log .* in my home directory and got nothing relevant. The thing is, I could have sworn that it was a line in slimserver.pref, but no, it's not in there. btw the log file is indeed monotonically increasing, which also bugs me as it seems like there should be an easy way to set a cap on it. Once again, consider the abused example of the older, allegedly computer-clueless user that uses the squeezebox and one fine day discovers that his system drive is no longer accepting any bytes. That would be a very very bad scenario, probably requiring a trip to the local apple store to talk to someone at the "genius" bar. Anyway, I periodically cat /dev/null onto the log file and leave it at that. Last night I made a point of actually reading the thing and I was able to clean up my music files of unwanted .cue confusers and non-flac files posing as such. So there is some useful information in it, but its growth could use better monitoring. -- trebejo trebejo's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=730 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=23020 ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
[slim] Re: Remind me what I did about slimserver.log
> > > Did you maybe put the --logfile switch in your start script? That's > something that people usually don't wipe out in an upgrade/reinstall. Eh... did I really do that? I'm on a Mac. I just click and grin. :) btw I did look at my .*rc files and nothing looked relevant. It's bizarre. I delete the usual suspects (~/Library/SlimDevices, ~/Library/Caches/SlimServer, ~/Library/PreferencePanes/SlimServer.prefPane, and ~/Library/Preferences/com.slimdevices.slim.plist). For all intents and purposes, that results in a brand new install... except for the log file! I am beginning to suspect the squeezebox itself... -- trebejo trebejo's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=730 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=23020 ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
[slim] Re: Okay, maybe it's time to call it a day...
keithleng Wrote: > The truth of the matter is that the squeezebox software is, and always > has been, very flakey. It is largely written by enthusiastic amateurs, > and it shows. On and off I tend to agree that slimserver is still an evolving interface whose robustness is not yet where it should be. However I take issue with your slur against amateurs. I find that equivalence between "professional" and "better" or "best" to be rather idiotic. Schubert was an amateur, while Brittney Spears is a pro in every sense of the word. Compare and contrast. I *heart* the open-source approach to slimserver. I know I'll put up with some grief from time to time, but I don't expect to face the day when the owner of slimserver (i.e. the universal set) will tell me that I no longer have access to my music as I desired it. Incidentally, that is essentially what happened when that lovely and well-designed iTunes program dropped flac support a few revisions ago. One more comment on the amateur vs. pro question: when it comes to making love, do you prefer someone that loves you or someone that you have to pay for? The answer that you give is what poker players call a tell. Cheers, Ariel -- trebejo trebejo's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=730 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=16523 ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
[slim] Re: A Silly Poll
44. I'm another one of those that has to do the arithmetic before answering... -- trebejo trebejo's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=730 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=22941 ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
[slim] Remind me what I did about slimserver.log
Ok, time for you to play Vulcan mindmeld and tap into my sleepy memory cells. Some time ago, I noticed an outrageous growth in the file slimserver.log, due to my unwitting attempt to slap id3 tags on flac files. I was older then... Among my decisions at the time was to relocate said file so that in future sneaky inexplicable symptom scenarios, the disk that would be filled to the brim would not be the system disk. I'm not sure that I want to change that decision just yet, but I am puzzled at the fact that no matter how thoroughly I wipe out the slimserver install (something I've done a few times), the log file returns to that non-standard location where I relocated it (even when it is wiped out during those re-installs). Looking through the files where I expect to find this setting, I see no mention of slimserver.log. I'm beginning to think that the squeezebox has even greater control over my conciousness than I previously realized. If you know the answer, please ease my mind and remind me of how I managed to relocate slimserver.log. I'm running a Mac, OS 10.4.latest, fwiw. Cheers, Ariel -- trebejo trebejo's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=730 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=23020 ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
[slim] Re: Anyone running Slimserver on a Mac Mini?
davidcotton Wrote: > So a system comprising a mac mini>wired SB3>usb external hd of any > make/capacity would work fine? Yes. I would recommend using firewire instead of USB (about a $10-20 markup on cost per external drive) for two reasons: 1. Firewire daisy-chains in a more straightforward manner. 2. USB hits harder on the cpu. With only one external drive, and with it dedicated solely to music, it may be a push between usb and firewire. However, I predict that at some point in the future you will be tempted to expand the external connection both in size and function. :) I was looking into this a few months ago (dear, has it really been only about three months??), and my last post in this thread is close to where I ended up: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=18555 The main difference is that I went with these cases instead, http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16817145657 because of their whisper-quiet and efficient fan-cooling systems. At the moment I've daisy-chained five of these and the performance has been excellent. Firewire is quirky so we'll see if it holds up on the scale of years, but if I decide that it's too flaky, I can always take out the drives and I'm only out the expense of the cases (for which there will often be some use). And yes, I went with a mini instead of linux and it ended up being a 1.5ghz g4 with 1 gig of RAM. It's not just the music server, it is also my desktop machine and I have to work pretty hard to make it do dropouts on the slimserver (dvd2onex is usually one of the ingredients). As long as the app is not keen on hijacking the cpu instructions, slimserver just keeps on running. One thing that happens is that the refresh page on "Browse Albums" takes a while (sometimes a minute or two). However that may have something to do with the size of my collection. :) The bandwidth off the firewire arrays is currently at about 100-120 MbPS (i.e. 12-13 MBPS), which is huge compared to what is needed for music (about 60x-100x for flac files). What that means in practice is that even if you are reading off one of the drives as you play songs, you can use that drive in all the usual ways such as intensive reading and writing from it and not have a problem. -- trebejo trebejo's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=730 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=21777 ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
[slim] Re: Booting Slimserver in OS X ... from the command line
Ok, it all came down to deleting these two files: ~/Library/Caches/com.apple.preferencepanes.cache ~/Library/Caches/com.apple.preferencepanes.searchindexcache which automatically get re-created when you click on "Start" in the preference pane button for slimserver. For some reason, the files as they were were messing things up. Thanks folks (and good eye kanoot, that was a sneaky one to catch). So as far as I can tell, when gremlins got your mac and you don't want to do the windoze approach of wiping the OS and reinstalling (ugh), do these: i) run disk utility and verify system drive and permissions ii) wipe out the files as outlined in this post iii) wipe out slimserver and reinstall it (I didn't have to do that this time) I really, really think this has to go in some obvious place in the documentation (maybe even the little booklet that gets shipped with the squeezebox) so that people that are not comfortable with surfing around the directories in a mac can still use the device "just like a cd player". I assume that this is more an OS issue than an application issue (although I don't know for sure), but it's still a robustness issue with the device and its server if something upstream breaks as mysteriously--and then gets fixed as easily--as this one did. One plus I'll mention before I go--the staff at slimdevices reads these posts and pitches in when they know something. They will have less of that to do if they put this tip somewhere. :) Cheers, trebejo -- trebejo trebejo's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=730 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=22208 ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
[slim] Re: What's a good backup utility?
Robin Bowes Wrote: > > So, what happens when you realise that you deleted a file just before > you ran rsync that you didn't mean to delete and that you'd really > like > to get back? I yell like a stuck pig, or I look at the other N,000 albums in my collection and cope with it. Your point is well taken of course. I make a big investment in my alertness at that moment before the "enter" key is pressed (e.g. no scotch before that keystroke). There is also something to be said about the nature of the filesystem. With scarcely any exceptions, the music files grow monotonically, and deletions are usually the consequence of having moved something around or having re-tagged something. Hence as far as my music collection is concerned, I'm pretty sure I've made a stable marriage with rsync. With data of a different nature, my concerns shift, which leads us to... > Sure, rsync is cool, but you're not really making a useful backup using > it like you are. > > Have a look at rsnapshot [1] - I think you'll like it. > > 1. http://www.rsnapshot.org/ > > R. Thanks! The multi-user flavor of that (root password need not be involved) makes it pretty suggestive for a multi-user system. There is a "learning curve--hit the next topic" tension in modernity that sometimes forces me to choose something like rsync rather than the next step up the chain. Personal on-topic recommendations are the typical stimulant for me to go ahead and make that next step (which is how I replaced a ghastly cp -R whatever command with rsync). And now if your tip bears fruit (it's in an O'Reilly so we're on our way), then my friend shall hear back from *me*. Unix tennis is a lovely game. Cheers, Ariel -- trebejo trebejo's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=730 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=22533 ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
[slim] Re: What's a good backup utility?
Please don't resent this unix-only solution, perhaps you might be interested (e.g. with a linux dual-boot setup where linux is used solely for system maintenance and debugging). Instead of simply re-writing the entire directory branch everytime I need to make a full back up, I only delete the obsolete files and update or copy the new ones by typing a single line in a terminal: $ rsync -av --delete /original/ /backup/ where "/original/" stands for the directory that has all the music files and "/backup/" stands for the place where it's being backed up. This rsync tool is pretty cool all-around, but in the context of large filesystems with relatively small changes, it's a godsend. Cloning a 300gb hard drive takes me about 5-6 hours, but that little command up there executes in a few minutes quietly in the background while I do whatever. Caveat emptor--this is a pretty sharp little blade. You can wipe out your backup if you make a mistake typing things in there, and if you are distracted enough to switch the places of original and backup, well, then you're going in the wrong direction in a one-way time machine. Come to think of it, Orwell used such a device in "1984". Cheers, Ariel -- trebejo trebejo's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=730 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=22533 ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
[slim] Re: After many months of smooth performance, slimserver won't boot
danco Wrote: > Well, as a bit of extra data, I have just upgraded Mac OS 10.4.5 to the > latest (version 1.1 of update 2006-002) and am using SlimServer 6.2.1. > > Absolutely NO problems. It started at login, and I have been able to > listen, to stop and restart the preference pane and so on. So it looks > as if it must be a Tiger issue or some corruption that is causing > Trebejo's problems. Thanks for letting me know. It's a bit of a relief to know that there isn't some generalized problem out there. > Trebejo, have you tried standard Mac problem-solving. Repairing > permissions, deleteingh preferences, etc. Yes, thanks, I tried the permissions before anything else. Deleting preferences... I take it you mean deleting any files that I could think of that are connected to slimserver? In my case that meant the .plist file, the PreferencePane app, and the ~/Library/Caches/SlimServer directory--they all got wiped. I ran ls -al in my home directory and found nothing. It's too bad that Apple didn't emphasize the .*rc approach to app configuration, but I guess that wasn't gooey enough for them. Cheers, trebejo -- trebejo trebejo's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=730 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=22188 ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
[slim] Re: Booting Slimserver in OS X ... from the command line
kanoot Wrote: > Just to let you know, I've been using tiger and slimserver with no > problems at all. > > I will look and see if I can find such a thing on my system too - but > let me suggest that you look around and try to find a cache file for > the slimserver preference pane - or for all panes in general. Blowing > that away might help if there is one. > > I'll get back to you if I find such a beast. Hmmm... an intriguing suggestion. Apparently I've got some quirky thing going on because other users with the same OS upgrade haven't had the same problem. That's a relief. So what files do you mean? I deleted the usual ~/Library/Caches/SlimServer directory before I started the round of reinstallations, of course. Do you mean either of these files? ~/Library/Caches/com.apple.preferencepanes.cache ~/Library/Caches/com.apple.preferencepanes.searchindexcache They are the only files in that directory that have recent revision dates. Is it safe to delete these wrt other apps on the preference pane? btw this came up in the other thread I started as a result of this event, but I'll mention it here for completeness--I did the usual round of repairing permissions and deleting the *slim*.plist file. Cheers, Ariel -- trebejo trebejo's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=730 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=22208 ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
[slim] Re: Booting Slimserver in OS X ... from the command line
netim3 Wrote: > My experience was that the command line > > ~/Library/PreferencePanes/SlimServer.prefPane/Contents/server/slimserver.pl > --daemon > > wouldn't work for me unless I renamed SlimServer.prefPane to remove the > '.' such that OSX treated it as a regular folder. Otherwise OSX didn't > seem to recognise the path. I'm curious how you've solved that > problem. > > Of course, when I do so, the SlimServer preference pane icon > disappears. > > > Could there be somethin common here - if you can run the command line > above, might the pref pane item be partially diabled somehow? Well, the plot thickens. I didn't do anything special--just used "show package contents" in Finder to help move around the directory, but Terminal always recognizes a directory as a directory. As for characters in pathnames, I don't think periods are supposed to be a problem. Other characters, yes--blank spaces are a typical problem--but that's usually solved by putting a backslash before the problematic character. At any rate, the preference pane continues to show up as such both in Finder and in System Preferences. And--this is a kicker--the "Stop Server" button works, even though its buddy "Start Server" doesn't. If you've got all your latest upgrades and things are working fine, let me know. Cheers, Ariel -- trebejo trebejo's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=730 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=22208 ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
[slim] Re: After many months of smooth performance, slimserver won't boot
dean Wrote: > Sorry that it's not working for you, and thanks for taking the time > to debug this. Oh, you know, we love our squeezebox and the people that bring it to us. *hug* > On Mar 17, 2006, at 7:42 PM, trebejo wrote: > > Sooo undocumented. > Well, it's in the normal place for Preference Panes on OSX. Regular > folks shouldn't have to dig down here, so there was no reason to > document the file layout for accessing it via Terminal. > I think the very events that I'm describing justify documenting alternative boot schemes somewhere, so that people don't waste their time hunting down phantoms (like I did with my poor network). For example, I read somewhere (can't remember where) that if your squeezebox is showing up with an IP address that begins with "169", then you've got a network problem. That's good to know. Also, consider this: at the moment, I don't mind one bit using the terminal to boot slimserver; in fact, I think it may well become the way I do things from now on. However, I would LOVE to get a refund on the hour(s) I spent wondering what I needed to do to fix it, but mere humans don't have access to the rewind hands on the big clock so that's that. Open source empowers you to tell the enduser as much as he is able to handle. I suppose that by leaving /longpathname/Installation.txt in the distro, you did just that for a guy like me, I suppose, but even a guy like me could use a "Here is how everything works" paragraph in an obvious place. > Please try downloading and reinstalling SlimServer from the Slim > Devices website. It's possible there's some kind of corruption in > the original install. Also, try setting it to not start up > automatically, then set it again to do so. Well, that's what I already did. Tried 6.2.1 and 6.2.2 (the nightly). Same symptom on both. The install *seems* to be ok. When booted from the command line, it works fine. I can see all my albums and do all my usual stuff. I just can't start by clicking on "start server" in the preference pane, or by setting that to boot automatically at boot time. The only change that has taken place that I can think of has been that wednesday-night Tiger update. I am borderline certain that something got broken there, probably by Cupertino. Nonetheless, there is a robustness issue here. Everything is ready to go--network, squeezebox, slimserver--and it all comes to a halt because the "start" button is temporarily fritzed out (just to make it that much easier to question my sanity, the other preference pane buttons that I clicked on worked as they should). It's like cancelling a moon launch because the taxi driver taking the astronaut to the space center gets a flat tire... this merits a separate thread, I'm sure, but when the box stopped working I realized that its dependence on "virtual" factors in comparison with a braindead CD player is still a cause for concern; by putting in little debugging steps, you can make the experience a lot saner for the end user. Anyway, I *am* running all that I need to run when I run /longpathname/slimserver.pl, right? Cheers, Ariel -- trebejo trebejo's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=730 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=22188 ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
[slim] Booting Slimserver in OS X ... from the command line
Hi, Ok, I figured out that the current setup is broken in a mysterious way (apparently since the latest upgrade in Tiger 10.4.5), but not in a hopeless way. I'd been running slimserver smoothly for about six months, and then yesterday, it wouldn't boot anymore. Basically, when I click on "Start Server" in the System Preference pane, nothing happens. No perl, no nuthin'. BUT if I go to a command line and type in $ ~/Library/PreferencePanes/SlimServer.prefPane/Contents/server/slimserver.pl --daemon then good ol' slimserver is back. Since slim wasn't booting up, I did a thorough wipe and re-install of 6.2.1. Nothing. So I went up to the nightly 6.2.2. Nothing. Then I started digging around the directories, found a doc meant for linux users, and used it to come up with the command-line above. Questions: 1) I switched from linux to macs for the effing gooey, dammit--why won't it work? 2) How about putting in some debugging info so that when this happens, the user gets something more useful than a non-response from the system? I got so much of nothing that I began to suspect (shudder) Network Issues. I even flirted with re-installing the OS. It's going to take a bottle of scotch to wipe away this trauma. 3) Should I run some other command in addition to or in place of the slimserver.pl line above, in order for slimserver to run properly? Cheers, Ariel -- trebejo trebejo's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=730 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=22208 ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
[slim] Re: After many months of smooth performance, slimserver won't boot
At the moment, I am able to boot by command-line. This is, like, SOOO undocumented. I had to dig around ~/Library/PreferencePanes/ then down to ~/Library/PreferencePanes/SlimServer.prefPane/Contents/server and then run $ ~/Library/PreferencePanes/SlimServer.prefPane/Contents/server/slimserver.pl --daemon (that's all on one line in case the forum editor turns it into two). Sooo undocumented. So now the server runs. The preference pane that you normally use to start slimserver (you know, the icon in System Preferences) shows the server as running and gives me the option to stop it. I still don't know what is broken, but it's as simple as "clicking on this button does not produce the desired activation". Just for a lark, I clicked on "Stop Server" and sure enough, it stopped it. Then I clicked on "Start Server" again (hoping it'd been a bootstrap hiccup) but no, it still doesn't work. I don't know if booting up this way neglects some other startup script that should be running. These are the things that keep me from giving a squeezebox to my friends and relatives. My father would disinherit me if I told him to play his music by just opening up the terminal and typing $ ~/Library/PreferencePanes/SlimServer.prefPane/Contents/server/slimserver.pl --daemon Cheers, Ariel -- trebejo trebejo's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=730 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=22188 ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
[slim] Re: After many months of smooth performance, slimserver won't boot
danco Wrote: > Just to double-check, what do you mean by "the latest Tiger upgrade"? My > machine works fine on 10.4.5 and I think that is working after the > Security Update 2006-001. I have tried 2006-002 yet. I mean to-the-day; that includes 2006-002, which was installed on the 14th. I actually don't know whether I tried to start up the slimserver since that install, but in particular I don't remember trying to do so. The 2006-002 update was primarily needed by me to fix rsync, which is how I back up my hard drives. However, there is a work-around, which is to install the darwinport of rsync and use it instead. That's what I'd done. I'd be all kinds of surprised if the slimserver-os x connection was so tenuous, and none of them good. The diagnostics are non-existent, too--there is no obvious place to find a record of what is going wrong. The install says that it succeeded, then I click on the start-up button, and nothing happens. Cheers, Ariel -- trebejo trebejo's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=730 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=22188 ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
[slim] After many months of smooth performance, slimserver won't boot
I've been having one of those "inexplicable" problems and when I came by here I noticed that there's a bit of this going around. I'm starting to wonder if the latest Apple Tiger upgrade didn't break something (which is what happened to rsync a couple of weeks ago). Basically, I've been using slimserver on a mac since last June, and yesterday I could not boot slimserver. I tried to find some networking problem, but no dice. I tried reinstalling but that doesn't help either. I can't even build the directory ~/Library/Caches/SlimServer (or was it Slimdevices? I can't remember but it's the one that contains the database). The usual perl command never shows up on ps. To debug the network, I first established a connection to slimnetworks, and got some bubbles and river sounds through. So the box is not totally fried. The network is a mini with ethernet at 192.168.0.101, airport at 192.168.0.100, di-524 router at 192.168.0.1, and SB2 at 192.168.0.102 all courtesy of dhcp. The firewall is set up as it always was with tcp and udp clear on 3483 and 9000. You know, the usual working rig. I tried quirky stuff like rebooting, unplugging router and squeezebox, holding down the "Add" button, etc. I even turned off the firewall but didn't get a reaction that way either. I can ping and traceroute to the squeezebox without a problem. I just can't get the bloody perl line started, or if I can, it dies awfully quick. Lest we suspect the perl command itself too quickly, its creation date is August 2005. It's been around. Oh before I forget, the rest of the network seems to be going as before. I can do iTunes, downloads, mail, web, etc. It's just the squeezebox that has gone partially bonkers; but its ability to get to Squeezenetworks tells me that the router/cable modem series is functional enough. I didn't drop a beer on the squeezebox, either. It's just been sitting in its usual well-ventilated spot, gathering a little dust but otherwise pampered. For starters, I'd appreciate being told if I am missing anything from a standard slimserver 6.2.1 or 6.2.2 install. All I can find right now after my latest attempt to install 6.2.2 are ~/Library/Preferences/com.slimdevices.slim.plist which is a 4 kb file of the plist kind and ~/Library/PerferencePanes/SlimServer.prefPane which is a directory with these stats: $ ls -lR ~/Library/PreferencePanes/SlimServer.prefPane/ | wc 3334 21644 181974 $ du -sh ~/Library/PreferencePanes/SlimServer.prefPane/ 27M In other words, around 3300 files with a total size of about 27 mb. Cheers, Ariel -- trebejo trebejo's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=730 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=22188 ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
[slim] Re: Headless Linux DIY contra turnkey NAS
First of all, I'd like to thank y'all for the very informative thread. I hope other people find it useful. On my end, after mulling things over and feeling quite lazy about the linux rtfm requirement, I've decided to go with a pins-and-needles-and-mac setup. I'm going to use firewire drives attached to an apple box (a mini or an old g4 tower would do), and add drives as needed. I chose firewire over usb 2.0 because of performance considerations and because it seems that the firewire approach lends itself more readily to a large external array. There will be a long firewire cable with repeaters leading to that distant closet if I use "my box", or an ethernet cable running out to the router if I get a dedicated apple box to sit in the closet with the drives; the drives will hang off a firewire hub with 30" cables so as to shorten the cable distance between any two nodes as well as reducing clutter. Each new hard drive will be cloned and the clone (sans enclosure) will be kept in a separate building; I'll deal with the "partially-filled" drive in some way, but I'm not so worried about the fragility of its data compared to that of the rest. Since the music collection consists of a monotonically increasing filesystem, this fairly brainless backup strategy should be good enough. One definite shift in my thinking that happened thanks to this thread is that now I will not assume that RAID protects my data for the long-term as securely as I'd like. I've tried to be picky with the enclosures for these firewires; I've ordered one of each of these to see which one I'll stick with for the long haul: http://www.supergooddeal.com/product_p/pm-350u2-bk--xx.htm http://www.censuspc.com/product.php?productid=3036&cat=72&page=1 The first one is smaller and less expensive, whereas the second looks like "good engineering" and I like its big fan. I'll try them both and take it from there. I'm going to need a case that is a kissing cousin of "hot swappable" for the cloning of the barebone drives; hopefully both of these can fulfill that function, so that the one that doesn't get to be the array model can still be the cloner. :) Wrt other external choices, the pair of seagates that I've been using are quiet enough to be in the listening room and they have worked more or less flawlessly for me: http://www.seagate.com/products/retail/external/usbfirewire (one of them had the inexplicable dismount a few weeks ago and OS X wouldn't recognize it initially but a quick look at it with a disk utility repaired it without a problem). They look pretty, too. However they do heat up a little bit (I wouldn't stack them as the picture suggests, but use them vertically and keep a gap between them). I also began to think that in the long term, if the case fails, I may have a bit of difficulty extracting the hard drive from within... that's when I realized that if I go with a barebone hard drive and a separately-chosen enclosure, I double the points of failure and should one component fail, I still get to keep the other hardware component (assuming the failure is not as catastrophic as, say, a fire). Aside from the brainless simplicity of this setup, I'm hoping that it'll perform better than the readynas as a slimserver platform, and of course at about $50/slot it is cheaper than the $600-700 for the four-drive readynas. btw if I'd done the linux box in the closet path, I would have picked this case http://www.thermaltake.com/xaserCase/armor/va8000swa/va8000swa.htm along with these sexy thangs, http://www.thermaltake.com/xaserCase/icage/icage.htm Of course this would have busted Pat's $400 budget. :) Cheers, Ariel -- trebejo trebejo's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=730 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=18555 ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
[slim] Re: Did The Boys At Slim Do A Bad Thing By Being So Customer Friendly?
seanadams Wrote: > Indeed! > > As a matter of fact, just the other day I called up Steve Jobs because > Mail was crashing. He tweaked the source and emailed me a new binary > while we were on the phone, but he told me all sorts of lies too > about... uh... this that and the other. I am never doing business with > that company and their Policy of Lies again!!! > > Dammit, Adams, instead of pestering him about his version of mail (you coulda used pine after all) couldn't you get him to fix his iTunes so that it'd work properly with the squeezebox? Priorities! -- trebejo trebejo's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=730 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=18223 ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
[slim] Re: Did The Boys At Slim Do A Bad Thing By Being So Customer Friendly?
Poor guy... he probably felt that his only interaction with the company was going to happen via the UPS truck, and he blew the obvious valve. There was a time where we required an expert to stand in front of us, or sit next to us, or in some other way make eye contact before we got on the ride. Now we see a web ad, maybe even read an online review and click it on over. The guy that bellyached is yelping against alienation, and the way that modern corpos abuse consumers. He just happened to yelp at some people that are certainly not rip-off artists but his instincts would all-too-often be right. Maybe he'll learn about online forums someday. :) How does a company like slimd explain the length and slope of the learning curve without losing new customers? I'm sure there are answers to that question, but it's a tricky question... -- trebejo trebejo's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=730 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=18223 ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
[slim] Multi-disc album and track order displayed in slimserver
Ok, I feel a bit lame because I'm sure this has been answered before. A run through the forum search didn't quite land here though, so off I go. I get an album with several CDs. I flac them, I tag 'em, and they sit in the directory. Sometimes the directory structure is dirname/*.flac sometimes it's dirname/N/*.flac where N is the disc number as a single digit. Since I assume that slimserver doesn't care about where the files reside, but only about the tags as they are applied to each individual track, I don't bother to distinguish between the above scenarios. After careful scrutiny of the tags used, I am rather certain that I have the same album name for a collection of tracks, and each track has a track number and a disc number. This is a monomorphism--i.e. each track has a distinct pair of track and disc numbers. You know, exactly the sensible thing to do. Alas, slimserver... well, when I go to "Browse Albums" and click on one of these multidisc babies, and then I get the track listing, I get one of three things: 1. Exactly what I want: Tracks in the order 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, ..., 2.1, 2.2, ... where the leading digit is the disc number. So it sorts first by disc, then by track; 2. The other numerical order you might imagine: 3.1, 2.1, 1.1, 3.2, 2.2, 1.2, ... 3. A bizarre one, an example of which is displayed in the graphic below: random sort by disc, then sort by track; http://forums.slimdevices.com/images/attach/jpg.gif In that example for the third way, the files are stored in the dirname/*.flac manner, with several tracks sharing the same "0n" start in their filename. When I look at their flac tags, however, the track number is the same but the disc number is as it should be--and slimserver uses that information but uses it in an excessively interesting manner. Try as I might, I don't see where in the preferences or server settings one can select the order in which tracks are displayed. This seems rather strange, actually; I would expect that setting to be somewhere but I can't find it and I've looked. If it's there, please embarrass me a little bit and tell me where it is; I'll get over it. Cheers, Ariel +---+ |Filename: multidiscbug.jpg | |Download: http://forums.slimdevices.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=512| +---+ -- trebejo trebejo's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=730 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=18645 ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
[slim] Re: Headless Linux DIY contra turnkey NAS
I've been withholding a reply to avoid thread fragmentation... Very informative comments to y'all, thanks. Nice backup scripts. LA's too far away from DC, Pat, otherwise I'd take you up on the offer. btw I agree about the *BSD v. linux approachable interface issues, but it should be mentioned at least in passing that I'm currently running a pretty approachable BSDish interface made by a Cupertino company. Good to hear that the Readynas is AMAZINGLY quiet. Too bad it dogs it with slimserver. I suppose slimserver could run on some other machine on the network and let the Readynas handle the storage only, but not actually play the tunes. This, for people that delete a thread when it heads down the linux way. wrt what I meant by "headless", I meant at the very least that it would run unattended without a monitor or keyboard. If it can reboot unattended and so forth that's all the better, since then I can get ambitious and actually park one of these things at my parents' and spread the joy. In either case, I'd run the slimserver either from another computer via a web browser or (and this feels like a stretch) solely with the remote control. Sure, it's nice to just put the hardware away from the squeezebox with good wiring or wireless, but I'm not counting on having a garage or a basement available. In fact I'm probably looking at a small apartment in a few months. But it's good to heap on all the arguments in favor of putting the server far away from the audio, since in the end it's an imperative that can be addressed. There's always a closet and a long ethernet cable... I'm surprised at how little you guys care for the RAID 5 idea. My problem is that at the moment I've got a couple of those external seagates (nice quiet gadgets and they look nice btw) and between the two of 'em they combine 700gb of room (ok 640gb actually) and they have about 30gb free combined. And that's after I backed up a little onto some DVDs. Perhaps it's the size of the collection that's the problem (I'm tagging like a madman so at the moment I only show the usual 900 album and 1 songs but I think that by the time it's said and done I'll be around the 3000 album line). Rock 'n roll won't take up so much space, but classical is a toughie because you can always get another version of symphony X... Anyway, back to the RAID issue. Doesn't the RAID do something about the occasional hard drive death? Like, if one dies, I can replace it and not lose any data? Yeah, sure, the big fire hits and all bets are off, but otherwise, isn't the RAID 5 setup quite a bit more robust than nothing at all? You guys make it sound like such a loser. I suppose that in RAID, the hard drives never get a break, whereas in "regular" the one that is currently playing a song runs while the others idle? Ugh. Ok. Use the RAID on a daily basis, and leave a bunch of these seagates in a closet in some other county as the data icebox. That means the same byte is written in three different places(!). Or don't run RAID at all, backup each drive in the server to the offshore seagate once in a while but only for the files that have changed; or some more sophisticated variation on that theme. btw Pat I think I was getting about 30GB/hour (so it'd take over 30 hours to do a terabyte--yipee) with the external seagates daisychained over firewire but my memory may be off; I'd run a test right now but when these guys get low on space they run a LOT slower so it'd be a bad reference. The box says they can do 400 Mbps but I never got close to that. Ok, RAID or not, I need a box, it needs to run linux, it needs four hard drives inside it, and I need an offshore closet to sleep soundly at night. The rough outline is becoming focused. > > Nah, the sweet spot currently is still at 320/300GB or perhaps 250GB. > If you don't run a large RAID 5 array, though, it may be worth the > investment in a larger drive just so you don't have to replace it down > the line. I think I'd look at the current size of my collection, then > at how quickly I expected that collection to grow. It depends on the fixed cost of the supporting hardware. With Pat's setup, that cost goes down dramatically and I'll bet the 320gb is sweetest; with the ReadyNAS, it's a push (I'm using the prices I can get via pricewatch.com). As a stand-alone, yes, the 250gb is cheaper in $/gb but your box maxes out at a lower storage total and then when you want more than a terabyte you have to build another one. I put some numbers in the spreadsheet and they told me it was so. :) http://tinyurl.com/8ykmz +---+ |Filename: readynas_cost_analysis.jpg | |Download: http://forums.
[slim] Headless Linux DIY contra turnkey NAS
ttp://www.endpcnoise.com/ There is a (computer) case that has garnered some nice reviews and it can be obtained for less than $100 (I believe "Radish" pointed it out on these fori): http://www.silentpcreview.com/article116-page1.html Other hardware considerations that I've thought about but for which I have little specific knowledge are: 1. Fan quality makes a big difference; apparently one can invest for ~$10 rather than ~$3 fans and lose a lot of noise. But I've seen ads for fans that cost $30+ so I'm still working on this clue. 2. Hard drives HAVE to make noise, and the noisy ones make a lot of it. Specific recommendations for SATA hard drives in the 250GB+ category would be most apropos. There is a case available that surrounds a hard drive and curtails its noise, but I am concerned about the hard drive heating up (even though the merchant claims that that's taken care of in the design of the case): http://www.endpcnoise.com/cgi-bin/e/driveaway_black.html 3. If the linux box can be made to run without a VGA card, then that's an extra fan that doesn't have to run (not to mention a savings of a few bucks). Motherboards seem to have integrated vga now but I don't know if that means running an extra fan. Running headless is better all around wrt the "black box" approach to feeding music to the squeezebox, anyway. So adding up the tab, we get motherboard, cpu, RAM, and case for about $400. Presumably this setup works better than, say, the ReadyNAS (albeit in a larger package), but one still has to rtfm and assemble (or hire someone else to do so, probably for another $100 or so). The hard drives then pop in at one's leisure. The current sweet spot seems to be 400gb (after taking the fixed cost of the box into account), but the 300gb are pretty much in the same ballpark in the $/gb sense so if one wishes to reduce the initial outlay by $200-300 then that option is available. Next year when the 400gbs are cheap (or so I dream) then I can order another drive and keep it in the closet for that fateful day. The 400gb's go for a shade over $200 each so four of them puts the total a bit over $800. [Aside: when the hard drive is advertised at 400 GB it actually only means 372 GB. The reason is a marketing one, having to do with whether one uses 1000 or 2^10 = 1024 as "a kilobyte". The marketing guys use 1000 but the computer uses 2^10 so you need to divide the stated size by 1.024 to get the actual size). So $400 + $800 + shipping/taxes brings the total for the dyi to about $1300. That would of course be a monster storage device at around 1.1 terabytes fully backed up, which is enough room for about 3300 CDs compressed in flac format. This would plug in quietly, efficiently and reliably (because we made it so) into your hi-fi rig, and give you storage for your other data needs. Indeed, this would be a case of the hi-fi gadget that actually helps out with all the other aspects of your daily living, which is certainly a reversal of the usual order. I'll pause now so you can drool a little bit. To sum up, I'd rather go DIY with the headless linux box for performance and compatibility/long-term reasons (after all Infrant could always get bought out by Jobs or Gates and turned into a crap product for some evil corporate reason). The feared rtfm factor sits there waiting, however; and the box does end up being bigger than the ReadyNAS. And who knows, maybe after I finish the DIY it ends up being noisier too! But I'm pretty sure it would run better... ahem, once the kinks were worked out. -- trebejo trebejo's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=730 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=18555 ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
[slim] Re: Network Storage: NAS or SAN
funkstar Wrote: > You don't list a price for something like that. You make an appointment > for a rep to visit you and then you plan your storage strategy and they > come and install it. > > Not something you pick up at Best Buy ;) Right. I remember when these suits would look at me and say "Linux?? Never heard of it!" So it wasn't actually a realistic or helpful suggestion to bring it up in the first place, but rather something between a joke and a waste of one's time. In my case, it was rather little of the former and all of the latter. -- trebejo trebejo's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=730 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=18311 ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
[slim] Re: Network Storage: NAS or SAN
kefa Wrote: > sounds like you need DMX-3... > > http://www.emc.com/products/systems/symmetrix/DMX_series/DMX3.jsp What do their boxes cost? They're coy about putting up the price tags. -- trebejo trebejo's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=730 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=18311 ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
