Status on Synology (Motorola MPC8241 PPC) fileserver?

[cstern]

Hi,

I have an Intel SS4000 diskserver but the closed design of this box has until now prevented me from even attempting to install firefly or any other mediaserver for that sake with the risk of brick’ing it. In stead I have used firefly on a PC, pointing to the SS4000 share where the music is.

Now I have just bought a Synology DS-107e diskstation as the ads show that this comes with a built-in mediaserver, so I wouldn’t have to start the PC to listen to music.

After installing it, it now appears, however, that the mediaserver is somewhat limited in functionality, compared to Firefly, e.g. it does not serve Song name, but only filenames and that alone makes it next to useless in my opinion.

Fortunately, Synology is an open design – they even have a hacking forum on the official Synology web site. Recently, an official patch (518) opens SSH and Telnet to the box, with root login etc.

I can see that in the summer Ron has done some work on the Synology binaries, but I am a little unsure what the status is. And what do I need to install it. For comparison, a Synology user has made a very nice step-by-step Wiki for firefly on the Marvell 88F5281 based Synology CS-407 (http://www.synology.com/wiki/index.php/Compiled_programs_for_Marvell_mv5281_ARM-based_Synology_Products#Firefly.2FMt-daapd_by_Mike)

Can this be adapted to the motorola PPC based DS- models? What bin-package should I use and where do I find (precompiled) libraries (as required in the wiki above)?

Sorry for being such an ignorant – I have not been using Unix for the last 15 years, and then only as a user, although I could install packages and such. I do remember basics though, so I would be able to follow the instructions in the wiki easily.

Thanks for your (great) assistance.

Claus Sternberg

[cstern]

I just installed the official Synolgy patch to enable telnet. I poked around in the different directories and found the files mt-daapd.conf and mt-daapd.playlist in /etc.

in /usr/syno/sbin resides a mt-daapd

How can I tell if this program is running and if it is indeed firefly server?
(ps | grep daapd does not show anything…)

And if it is firefly – how can I check/set the configuration? The mt-daapd.conf file contains only the single word ‘servername’ without the quotes.

[cstern]

Now I found this out:
The mt-daapd on the DS seems to be what Synology calls iTunesServer – and it does that – i.e. serves to iTunes. But not to other clients. So I will still need to install the new firefly on the box.

Which leads me to another question: Will the powerpc binaries from nightlies.mt-daapd.org run on the Motorola FreeScale MPC8241 (PPC) hardware? Am I right in assuming the ds101g_powerpc.ipk binary is in fact for the Synology box? (ps. I can not use the stable version since I need to stream to a Pinnacle M1001)

Do I need additional libraries – which?

Is there an installation help for the DS101g / DS107e somewhere? I can see several other hardwares on the wiki.

[fizze]

Use the search function in this board and search for “synology” 😉
There have been quite a few folks who have tried firefly on their boxes. None with too exciting results, I’m afraid though.

[cstern]

yup, that was the first thing I did. That is why I was asking for the status of the project, since the last report is several months old.

Thanks,

Claus

[fizze]

Alright, didn’t mean to be blunt. 🙄

I think it wouldn’t hurt to produce some kind of device compatibility table of firefly, wouldn’t you think?

[cstern]

@fizze wrote:

Alright, didn’t mean to be blunt. 🙄

I think it wouldn’t hurt to produce some kind of device compatibility table of firefly, wouldn’t you think?

Don’t worry, I didn’t feel offended at all.

Yes, it would be excellent with a compatibility list – it would make life a lot easier for people like me 😆

I will try to install firefly on my DS-107 and report back what happens. The mt-daapd that is pre-installed doesn’t work with the M1001 and the mediaserver (whatever that is) breaks with the large number of music pieces I have.

[fizze]

Actually I’ve seen that there is unslung also available for the DS-101. I wonder if the 107 is that different.

If you are running some flavour of linux, it is actually very easy to set up a cross-compilation environment.

[cstern]

So, – now I have downloaded and installed the ipkg tool from NSLU2 site. The DS107e is similar to the DS101+ (powerpc).

I then ran ipkg update and downloaded the powerpc.ipk file from the nightlies site. and installed it using ipkg

Then I modified the mt-daapd.conf file to point at the music files and rebooted.

The startup took a little while, 4-5 mins and after that I can see that mt-daapd is running. However, I can not connect to the web-admin interface and I can not see it from the M1001.

How can I tell if mt-daapd is busy rescanning and therefore can not serve the webinterface etc?

Log below:

Nov 15 21:17:57 mt-daapd[719]: Config entry general/playlist is deprecated. Please review the sample config
Nov 15 21:17:57 mt-daapd[719]: Firefly Version svn-1696: Starting with debuglevel 2
Nov 15 21:17:57 mt-daapd[719]: Plugin loaded: ssc-script/svn-1696
Nov 15 21:17:57 mt-daapd[719]: Plugin loaded: rsp/svn-1696
Nov 15 21:17:57 mt-daapd[719]: Plugin loaded: daap/svn-1696
Nov 15 21:17:57 mt-daapd[719]: Starting rendezvous daemon
Nov 15 21:17:57 mt-daapd[719]: Starting signal handler
Nov 15 21:17:58 mt-daapd[721]: Initializing database
Nov 15 21:21:24 mt-daapd[721]: Starting web server from /opt/share/mt-daapd/admin-root on port 3689
Nov 15 21:21:25 mt-daapd[721]: Registering rendezvous names
Nov 15 21:21:29 mt-daapd[721]: Serving 22629 songs. Startup complete in 209 seconds
Nov 15 21:21:29 mt-daapd[721]: Rescanning database
DiskStation>

[cstern]

STOP! Goddammit!! IT works!

yes yes yes.

I was just a little too impatient.

I will let it run over night and see if it stays OK. If yes, I will write a new post with a step-by-step instruction.

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