mt-daapd (Firefly) and spin-down recovery

[Anonymous]

I’m using mt-daapd/Firefly (version svn-1696) on my Linksys NSLU2 under Unslung (V2.3R63-uNSLUng- 6.10-beta).
I have a Maxtor One-Touch HD that I’ve set to spindown after 5 hours of inactivity.

My problem is that, while the Slug seems to handle the disk spindown flawlessly, Firefly appears not to be so accommodating. After the period of inactivity (supposedly once the drive spins down), sometimes the server will still appear in iTunes but all the selections will be unavailable (clicking on them to play results in the ! icon appearing next to the track), OR the server will fall off of the iTunes list altogether.

Sometimes just hitting the Unslung admin brings it back… which leads me to believe that Firefly can’t, on it’s own, wake up the drive properly.

I’m just wondering if there’s a config setting I’m missing, or if anyone else is seeing the same behavior.

Thanks!
-Carl

[jtbse]

Hmm…

I wonder if it really has something to do with iTunes and DAAP?? I use a Maxtor on my slug running svn-1696, set to spin down as well, and don’t have such problems.

But I almost never listen with iTunes. Almost always use SoundBridge(s) and RCP.

[stretch]

Same with me. NSLU, Maxtor One touch drive. Spins down & back up again just fine when the SoundBridge accesses Firefly.
But then, i don’t use iTunes much either.

What i have noticed, when connecting iTunes directly to the library on the NAS, is that it doesn’t wait long enough for the drive to spin up.
In this case, if you’ve mapped the network share to a drive letter in Windows. The drive will often not spin up at all.
If iTunes is given the actual path to the network share then it will spin up the drive.

[Anonymous]

Do you both use Unslung on the NSLU2? Or something else?

I’d try a SoundBridge, if I had one, just to see if it’s my setup. But I’m unlikely to get one any time soon.

At the moment, it’s iTunes or nothing. And the idea of nothing just isn’t all that appealing 😉

[jtbse]

Stretch’s setup is in his sig.

As for me…yes…Unslung 6.8

But I also have the drive mapped as a Windoze Samba share. I have noticed that some Windoze apps (e.g. WinAmp) will not spin the drive up on their own. I have to actually access it in Explorer to get it to spin up in that case, prior to accessing it with the offending app.

[stretch]

I think that iTunes won’t spin up a network drive if it’s mapped to a windows drive letter. Not sure if Windoze is not recognising the access request or iTunes is timing out.
I do know that Windows likes to disconnect mapped network drive if there is no activity on that drive.

When you use the actual path as the library location (i.e. \servernamesharename) iTunes starts to behave itself.
NB: I’ve seen iTunes reset the library location to the default because it can’t connect to the mapped drive. Rather annoying behaviour…

[mattb]

I have a different NAS, but I think I had a similar problem. On my D-Link DNS-321 it seemed that FF wasn’t waking the device up properly. I turned on logging at debug level 5 to try and get to the bottom of it and just doing that seems to have helped! When I power up my Soundbridge after the NAS has spun down, I immediately get a message that it failed to connect. In the past I could try and try again and it would continue to fail but since I turned up the logging, it now seems to always reconnect on the second try. I thought I’d mention it in case it might help your situation too. Good luck!

[Anonymous]

@stretch wrote:

I think that iTunes won’t spin up a network drive if it’s mapped to a windows drive letter.
: snip
When you use the actual path as the library location (i.e. \servernamesharename) iTunes starts to behave itself.

I’m confused.
I thought the whole point of Firefly was to expose the library to iTunes as a remote server via daap. Why would mapping a Windows drive letter, using the actual path, or setting up a samba share even be necessary?
Am I missing something?

Since I have Firefly set up to serve the library over daap, I don’t think the issue is iTunes. iTunes is simply playing with what it’s being provided. The actual file access is by Firefly, is it not? So it would follow that the responsibility of waking the drive up from a spindown would rest squarely with Firefly, would it not?

[stretch]

As i mentioned, Firefly does spin up the HDD in my set-up BUT iTunes is directly accessing the library (for library management purposes) and it will not spin up the HDD if accessing it as a mapped drive in windows.

I use Firefly for streaming music to a couple of Roku SoundBridges. iTunes accesses the library directly.

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