Connection Issues

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  • #634
    Al_Vampyre
    Guest

    Hi there, long time lurker, first time poster looking for some info.

    I have an XP box and a Netgear DG834G Wireless router, the PC is cabled to the router but the Roku runs wirelessly (in the kitchen next to the PC room) and I’ve been having some issues.

    First of all can I say that the Roku was a Xmas present for my partner whose comment last night was ‘If you can’t get that da***ed thing working properly then you should just have bought me a CD player!’ so I really need help!!

    Basically, the Roku frequently fails to connect to the Firefly Media Server even though the system tray icon claims the server is running – usually you can get it to connect by opening Firefly and stopping then restarting the server, occasionally that doesn’t work and you need to restart the Soundbridge to get a connection.

    I have also noticed that if I’m hammering the ADSL connection for example downloading the new Vista beta (last night when ‘her indoors’ went a bit postal on me because she couldn’t have tunes and cook at the same time!) that the connection issues are more frequent and can only be solved by stopping the download.

    Previously (and I really hate to say this) I was using WMC2 to stream to the Soundbridge and it seemed to happen less frequenty then but my plan is to migrate (gradually) to Ubuntu so I need something that will work on Linux…

    I’d be grateful for any suggestions…even if the fault lies with my router!

    Thanks in advance,

    Al

    #6613
    rpedde
    Participant

    @Al_Vampyre wrote:

    Previously (and I really hate to say this) I was using WMC2 to stream to the Soundbridge and it seemed to happen less frequenty then but my plan is to migrate (gradually) to Ubuntu so I need something that will work on Linux…

    I’d be grateful for any suggestions…even if the fault lies with my router!

    As a last-ditch workaround, you can remove the “rsp.so” from your plugins line in the config file. That will make it daap only, and I think the consensus is that people have been having more reliable connections using daap than rsp, although rsp is much faster.

    I think the problem is related to dropped wireless connections on the sb side, but I’m not sure. I talked a bit with the roku guys and they were kind of perplexed as well.

    Next nightly I’m going to add more log messages in the area that this is happening to try and nail down exactly what I see on my side. Maybe that will either highlight a problem on my side, or expose a problem on the other side. Either way, I hope that more debugging info will help nail this down.

    Probably be tomorrow before I get the new nightly out, though.

    In the meantime, try the daap-only approach and see where that gets you.

    — Ron

    #6614
    Al_Vampyre
    Guest

    I’ll do that Ron and let you know how I get on, thanks for your help…

    #6615
    Al_Vampyre
    Guest

    Hello again,

    On my XP setup, the latest nightly build seems to be much more reliable and I haven’t had any complaints from the other half so all seems OK.

    My ubuntu setup however is giving me some problems, the Roku is connecting to the server and according to the web admin page everyhting looks ok but whatever file I try to play I’m getting an unable to play file error.

    Now the strange thing is that the only thing I have done recently to my Ubuntu setup (which was working) was to upgrade to the K7 SMP kernel to make use of the fact that I have a dual core Opteron in this machine.

    Is there a problem with this kernel, or has updating it broken something else, I have already tried to reinstall Firefly (last stable build, I’m too much of a Linux n00b to get the nightly rpm working on Ubuntu!) but it hasn’t fixed it…any ideas??

    Thanks in advance

    Al

    #6616
    rpedde
    Participant

    @Al_Vampyre wrote:

    Is there a problem with this kernel, or has updating it broken something else, I have already tried to reinstall Firefly (last stable build, I’m too much of a Linux n00b to get the nightly rpm working on Ubuntu!) but it hasn’t fixed it…any ideas??

    Is it possible that permissions changed on the mp3 files? That’s typically what makes makes the files not able to play.

    Also, check the log file… if it’s a permissions problem or something related, it will usually drop an error message in the log.

    — Ron

    #6617
    Al_Vampyre
    Guest

    Ah, now that is a possibility, I changed the set up from manually mounting the Music disc (separate NTFS hard drive for Music) to automatically mounting the hard drive on start up to make it easier. I wonder if the permissions were changed as well?

    Can I deal with that by changing the ‘runas’ portion of the mt-daapd.conf to ‘root’ rather than ‘alastair’ as it is at the moment or will I need to change the permission for the disk?

    #6618
    rpedde
    Participant

    @Al_Vampyre wrote:

    Ah, now that is a possibility, I changed the set up from manually mounting the Music disc (separate NTFS hard drive for Music) to automatically mounting the hard drive on start up to make it easier. I wonder if the permissions were changed as well?

    Can I deal with that by changing the ‘runas’ portion of the mt-daapd.conf to ‘root’ rather than ‘alastair’ as it is at the moment or will I need to change the permission for the disk?

    You could do that, but I wouldn’t do that on an installation that is exposed to the internet or anyone malicious.

    It’s possible one could introduce a badly formatted mp3 file, or try overflow through a connect, so I’d only do that if it were on my home network and wasn’t worried about someone other than me having access to the network.

    But yeah, you could do that.

    — Ron

    #6619
    Al_Vampyre
    Guest

    Thanks for the tip Ron, I discovered that when I alter the fstab file the disks get mounted with the owner as root and Firefly won’t play them. If I mount them myself through Nautilus then I’m the owner and Firefly plays them just fine. I would love to get the automount working though because having to mount the disks is not something Catherine will do herself..she just wants the Soundbridge to work, the other option is to mount them manually and then just not reboot the machine!! I’m playing with a few alternatives I’ve found on Google so hopefully I’ll get it to work soon.

    I took a chance and changed the runas line to root in the config but it didn’t actually make any difference, files still wouldn’t play. Have now changed it back as a result of your last post 😉

    I think the answer may be to backup everything and change the disc I store my music on to ext3 rather than ntfs and then install a driver that allows XP to see and write to my ext3 disks.

    The important thing is that Firefly now works in both XP and in Ubuntu so thanks for all your help…

    #6620
    rpedde
    Participant

    @Al_Vampyre wrote:

    I would love to get the automount working though because having to mount the disks is not something Catherine will do herself..she just wants the Soundbridge to work

    you are probably looking for the “uid” and “gid” options to mount.

    You can use the ID command (logged in as you) to find out what uid and gid you have:


    ron@debian-server:~$ id
    uid=1000(ron) gid=1000(ron)

    Then you can add the line in fstab to something like:


    /dev/hda1 /mnt/ntfs ntfs uid=1000,gid=1000 0 0

    The important bits being the uid=1000,gid=1000, which mounts it owned by you and your primary group. The rest of it you can change as necessary.

    — Ron

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