Scanning outside of the specified directories?

[Anonymous]

I am not entirely sure, but I have the feeling that svn-1696 scans outside of the directories I specified.

OS: Kubuntu 8.04
Architecture: i686

The directories are always /media/something for me.

Still, enabling level 9 logging and glancing there, I see it scans the entire “/”.

Is it just my impression, or “Found /path/to/unspecified/directory” is really the proof it scans /path/to/unspecified/directory?

It lacks logic.

If

mp3_dir = /media/storage,/media/sda9

then under NO circumstance should it scan in /home/user!

Log excerpt:

2009-05-29 02:28:21 (b74c46c0): Found snpstd.. recursing

2009-05-29 02:28:21 (b74c46c0): Found /home/alex/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/Common Files/snpstd/usnpstd.exe

2009-05-29 02:28:21 (b74c46c0): Found /home/alex/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/Common Files/snpstd/h71rstd.reg

etc.

[EVILRipper]

It scans recursively. The only reason it should/could scan other directories is when there is a symbolic link somewhere in those directories, pointing somewhere else. For example, if you have mounted /media/sda9 to your own harddisk, it will scan your whole filesystem.

[Anonymous]

@EVILRipper wrote:

It scans recursively. The only reason it should/could scan other directories is when there is a symbolic link somewhere in those directories, pointing somewhere else. For example, if you have mounted /media/sda9 to your own harddisk, it will scan your whole filesystem.

I figured it scans recursively, but it should scan only the specified directories.

I have mounted the partition /dev/sda9 into the /media/sda9 location.

If by “when there is a symbolic link somewhere in those directories, pointing somewhere else” you mean that if there is a symlink somewhere in /media/sda9 pointing to the, say, “/home/user/something” location, then it would be OK if it would only scan “/home/user/something” (if such a location exists).

What I find counter-intuitive (and devious haha) is the fact that it scans all /home/user.

Surely, the majority of people would perceive the expression “recursing scan” as a scan done in “the/specified/directory/” and “the/specified/directory/and/all/its/subdirectories/”, i.e. a “downward” recurse, not an “upward” one.

It’s confusing to perceive a “recursing scan” in “the/specified/directory/” as a scan done also in “/the/parent/of/the/specified/directory”.

Wait, does what I’m saying here make sense? : )

[EVILRipper]

Umm, I’m not sure. 🙂
A downward recurse.. I believe there’s no such thing, as that would result in a full filesystem scan.

However, if there’s a symbolic link that points to /home, all subdirs of /home would be scanned. That’s what I meant.

[Anonymous]

@EVILRipper wrote:

Umm, I’m not sure. 🙂
A downward recurse.. I believe there’s no such thing, as that would result in a full filesystem scan.

Oh, okay, then it means I must have been too obscure. Coherent wording is not my gift.

However, if there’s a symbolic link that points to /home, all subdirs of /home would be scanned. That’s what I meant.

OK, I see. In clear terms, what I wanted to say was that if there’s a symbolic link that points to /home/user/temp, then only /home/user/temp should be scanned. However, from my logs, I got that /home/user was scanned, entirely.

[EVILRipper]

find /media/sda9 -type l

This should find all symbolic links within /media/sda9.
When results were found, go to the directory containing that file/folder.

ls -l

Will show where the symbolic links points at.

[Anonymous]

@EVILRipper wrote:

find /media/sda9 -type l

This should find all symbolic links within /media/sda9.
When results were found, go to the directory containing that file/folder.

ls -l

Will show where the symbolic links points at.

I know that. What I am trying to point out, EVILRipper, is the fact that no symbolic link in the directories specified as “mp3_dir” points to my home directory (“/home/alex”).

Look…

root@godzilla:/tmp# grep mp3_dir /etc/mt-daapd.conf

mp3_dir = /media/storage,/media/sda9

So now let’s take a look at those two partitions.

root@godzilla:/tmp# for mp3dir in storage sda9 ; do find "/media/${mp3dir}" -type l -exec ls -l {} ; >> symlinks_${mp3dir}.txt ; echo "$mp3dir: " ; grep "/home/alex" symlinks_${mp3dir}.txt ; done

storage:

sda9:

lrwxrwxrwx 1 alex alex 39 2007-10-14 18:44 /media/sda9/other/___non-metal_-_non-ambient___/Vangelis -> /media/sda6/home/alex/Desktop/Vangelis/

I think it’s pretty straightforward. What I did was to create two files called symlinks_storage.txt and symlinks_sda9.txt which contain the output of that `find’ command. That `find’ finds all symbolic links in those directories and does a `ls -l’ on them. The next thing I did was to grep through the text files to search for any occurrence of “/home/alex” which is my home partition and which should NOT get scanned.

The symlink you see there, in sda9, pointing to /media/sda6/home/alex/Desktop/Vangelis, is an old and broken symbolic link. There is no /media/sda6 location on my system.

So then, why does mt-daapd scan in “/home/alex” after all?

[EVILRipper]

I’m not sure. Maybe firefly has strange behavior when scanning a broken symlink. Maybe you missed a symlink because you grepped on /home/alex? (unless that was just for the single relevant result). I just haven’t seen anybody saying firefly scans in the wrong dir..

[Anonymous]

@EVILRipper wrote:

I’m not sure. Maybe firefly has strange behavior when scanning a broken symlink. Maybe you missed a symlink because you grepped on /home/alex? (unless that was just for the single relevant result). I just haven’t seen anybody saying firefly scans in the wrong dir..

Well, I grep-ed on “/home/alex” because I noticed a disturbing number of lines in the log file relating to scans in /home/alex.

Other than that, I couldn’t have missed a symlink to anything containing “/home/alex” using grep and yes that broken symlink was indeed the only thing (it pointed to a long-discarded partition which had a then-home-directory mounted).

For the sake of it, I removed the broken symlink. Now there’s no such thing.

So it shouldn’t scan /home/alex.

Well… did the same thing: emptied log, deleted database, started mt-daapd.

It still scans /home/alex. :-/

[fizze]

Care to post your mt-daapd.conf?
What version of firefly do you use?

[Author]

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