Time-out for off-line files

[cstern]

My music is located on a NAS drive, which I have to turn on before it it is available. Firefly is running on one of my PCs and everything works fine.

One small problem is that if the NAS is off (e.g. at boot time) the firefly server quickly “sees” that and – obviously – serves zero files. The songs3.db file is also emptied. When the NAS is back on line, firefly has to re-index the whole music storage (12000 files) and it takes quite a while.

My suggestion is that, when defining the location of the music, it should be possible to mark the location as volatile/removable – and if it is not there, the server should gracefully wait until it becomes available -keeping the songs.db file intact. For instance it could probe the location with intervals (user definable) and resume normal operation when it is back on line.

This way the index files (songs3.db etc) are not unnessesarrily rebuilt.

Best regards,

Claus Sternberg

[rpedde]

@cstern wrote:

My music is located on a NAS drive, which I have to turn on before it it is available. Firefly is running on one of my PCs and everything works fine.

One small problem is that if the NAS is off (e.g. at boot time) the firefly server quickly “sees” that and – obviously – serves zero files. The songs3.db file is also emptied. When the NAS is back on line, firefly has to re-index the whole music storage (12000 files) and it takes quite a while.

My suggestion is that, when defining the location of the music, it should be possible to mark the location as volatile/removable – and if it is not there, the server should gracefully wait until it becomes available -keeping the songs.db file intact. For instance it could probe the location with intervals (user definable) and resume normal operation when it is back on line.

This way the index files (songs3.db etc) are not unnessesarrily rebuilt.

Best regards,

Claus Sternberg

doing this right turns out to be harder than it seems. I think probably something like this will be done, but I’m not entirely sure how at this point.

[fizze]

Well, perhaps its useless to point out, but for the sake of completeness I will, nonetheless 😉

Firefly itself is perhaps capable of running on the NAS – what specific device is this?

This would of course more elegantly elude your problem 🙂

[cstern]

@fizze wrote:

Well, perhaps its useless to point out, but for the sake of completeness I will, nonetheless 😉

Firefly itself is perhaps capable of running on the NAS – what specific device is this?

This would of course more elegantly elude your problem 🙂

You are right, but in this case I fear there are no chance of installing software on the device, although it runs some sort of Linux. It is an Intel SS4000-E four-disk device. It would be great if it could run from there but I believe it is not possible – if you know of a way, I’d be happy to learn about it.

Link:
SS4000-E Homepage

[rpedde]

@cstern wrote:

@fizze wrote:

Well, perhaps its useless to point out, but for the sake of completeness I will, nonetheless 😉

Firefly itself is perhaps capable of running on the NAS – what specific device is this?

This would of course more elegantly elude your problem 🙂

You are right, but in this case I fear there are no chance of installing software on the device, although it runs some sort of Linux. It is an Intel SS4000-E four-disk device. It would be great if it could run from there but I believe it is not possible – if you know of a way, I’d be happy to learn about it.

Link:
SS4000-E Homepage

Looks like a fairly standard machine running redboot. Should be pretty hackable if you wanted to.

http://em7210.kwaak.net/

and

http://cyrius.com/debian/iop/

— Ron

[cstern]

It seems doable, but being a complete imbecile with regard to Linux and hacking I think (for me) it is better left to those capable of doing such things. Also I am not really sure what to do – the kwaak project seems a bit preliminary at this point.

So for me it would be easier if Firefly could just ignore/wait/retry if the NAS is (temporarily) unavailable.

Thanks for the link anyway – it was interesting

Claus

[fizze]

Hehe, nice coincidence. Thats the NAS Im gonna get in a few weeks! 😉
I’ll deffo spend some time to hack mt-daapd on it.

So sit back, relax…. 🙂 😉

I suppose you run 4 disks and RAID 5 / 10 on it? Hows real-world performance, power consumption and, also important: noise levels?

[cstern]

It quite noisy and the performance with Windows is not impressive at all. The response time is quite long for initial access, but after that things are working OK. But compared to a real file server it is slow. E.g. it is an annoyance that it can take a few seconds after selecting “open” in Excel until the NAS responds when the files open instantaneous when located on the local disk. Anyway it is cheap and (apparantly) can be hacked.

I run mirrored disks – at the moment I only have two disks mounted but will add another two 500GBs when the current space is filled up.
As for the noise it is dependent on load and I guess you can’t have a real quiet system if you also want to keep the temp down. I plan to shove it away in a closet somewhere out of my office and have bought some 10m Cat6 cables for that.

Please keep me (us) posted on you hacking experiences.

[fizze]

Well, since there are no real numbers out there for the SS4400, I suppose you don’t have any?

I currently use the NSLU2, which is really slow, I/O wise. But its enough to even stream HDTV video content, so there is no way the SS4400 can possibly be slower. 😉

I have yet to make up my mind about it, but I really need more storage, plus redundancy. Currently this dev looks like the best chance.

edit:
I just read on various forums that the SS4000 series already comes with a built-in daap server (which product could this possible be *cough* :D) – so you might just try to get telnet running (user root, pwd same as the web-admin) and see if you can find a mt-daapd binary 😉

[cstern]

@fizze wrote:

Well, since there are no real numbers out there for the SS4400, I suppose you don’t have any?

I currently use the NSLU2, which is really slow, I/O wise. But its enough to even stream HDTV video content, so there is no way the SS4400 can possibly be slower. 😉

It is SS4000-E not SS4400-E – I haven’t heard about a SS4400 – but it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.

The storage is not slow in the sense that is is serving the files slowly – but the access time is sometimes very long, 2-5 sec or so – which can seem forever when you expect the files to pop up immediately.

It does it’s job, but I am used to real servers at work where the response is like when the disks are inside your own PC.

After all this is a semi-pro device priced accordingly, so I guess you can not ask too much, performance-wise.

I might take the device apart so I can get to the serial port and try to connect to it – it is not possible to telnet via the ethernet port.

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