[Announce] SlimNAS 0.1 - SlimServer on FreeNAS

[supertrogg]

Thanks again for the reply.
I can see my music if I Browse > Music Folder.
However, scan just will not run. But if I select an album to play the count of albums, songs and artists increase. But the nusic is unlistenable, it is all chopped up, seems to be fast forwarding and cuts out.
The computer it is installed on is an Epia SP8000.
Just rebooted freeNAS and the Slimserver install has gone!!

[ltb76]

Oki - I think there is something wrong with your installation then. Try to remove the installation and redo it.

Lasse

[supertrogg]

Yes, there is something wrong here. Just after my last post I went through everything again. Whilst testing different folders I inadvertently left it set for an MP3 folder on the same NAS. These are corrupted and wont play on my PC. I set it to the flac share but with the same results.
After reinstalling SS I can now scan the flac folder but the flacs appear to be corrupted too. A known good flac was transferred into the flac share and this plays fine. Following another reboot the SS extension has remained in the menu.
Success at last. Now that this is working, but after more testing, the Infrant NAS I have can finally be relegated to file serving duties (it is what it was designed to do) and the PC can finally be relegated back to being a PC instead of a music server. The freeNAS box is a lot less power hungry, an Epia 800Mhz cpu against 2 x 3.2Ghz Xeons!!

Thank you very much for your help Lasse.

[boerner]

Hello Michael,

I just did a fresh install of FreeNAS 0.683b and everything worked perfectly. This is on a machine with two hard disks, the first holding the OS, the second holding the data. Started up Slimserver fine, copied some music over, scanned, and was playing on the Squeezebox fine. I rebooted and the Extensions menus item was gone. I saw the earlier post with the same behavior, but have this to offer:

As far as I can tell, when FreeNAS is installed to local disk it creates two partitions, one for the OS and one for the data. If I am reading things right it looks like it only creates about a 20 meg partition for the OS (which I assume is because ideally it would run from a small flash device). I can then then also assume that when the install runs it is able to load everything in RAM, but does not have enough space to save the new files that reference the slimserver installation to disk?

I can try to re-install or anything that you would like. Thanks in advance for any and all help.

[tommypeters]

Good work

I'm thinking of building a simple micro-ATX computer for SlimServer, with hibernate/Wake-on-LAN it would possibly on a yearly basis not use up too much more power than an "always-on" NAS (Synology DS-106 with SlimServer 6.5 and many plugins will not let HDDs hibernate). When used it should be much faster, though.

The Apevia X-QPack chassi is cheap and while much bulkier than a NAS I think I can have it hanging under my desk. The larger chassi size would make it less prone to over-heating.

I guess all currently available processors with 512MB RAM would be well enough for running FreeNAS/SlimServer? Which processor does emit the least heat?

[boerner]

Replying to myself again...

Michael,

I just re-read your posting on the FreeNAS list regarding clicking the Save button on the Slimserver menu item under extensions. Sorry I missed that. Maybe add that tidbit to the instructions page on your website? I promise I followed them to the letter earlier :-) The Slimserver install survives reboots now. Thanks again for the great work.

[superpat999]

Hi,

I just installed FreeNas, your slimserver extension and Slimserver 6.5.1 on a Epia Via ML6000 mini-itx system It took less than an hour from download to finish!

It works extremely well!

Many, many thanks! ( where's the donation button? )

One question... AlienBBC?

cheers

Patrick

[superpat999]

Hi

Last night I copied my music folder to the FreeNas share. All Ok

I can play music on Squeezebox using browse music folder.

This morning I started a scan of my music folder with SLimserver

After 5 minutes or so I got this error in the Freenas error log:-

Feb 1 08:55:09 kernel: pid 188 (perl), uid 80, was killed: out of swap space
Feb 1 08:55:09 kernel: pid 188 (perl), uid 80, was killed: out of swap space
Feb 1 09:10:11 kernel: pid 211 (mysqld), uid 80 inumber 8288 on /: filesystem full

I think I set the Free Nass up OK. I am using one 160GB Sata drive. I told Freenas to install two partions, I have put slimserver and the music folder on the second.

Here is the partition info:-

$ fdisk /dev/ad4
******* Working on device /dev/ad4 *******
parameters extracted from in-core disklabel are:
cylinders=310101 heads=16 sectors/track=63 (1008 blks/cyl)

Figures below won't work with BIOS for partitions not in cyl 1
parameters to be used for BIOS calculations are:
cylinders=310101 heads=16 sectors/track=63 (1008 blks/cyl)

Media sector size is 512
Warning: BIOS sector numbering starts with sector 1
Information from DOS bootblock is:
The data for partition 1 is:
sysid 165 (0xa5),(FreeBSD/NetBSD/386BSD)
start 63, size 65457 (31 Meg), flag 80 (active)
beg: cyl 0/ head 1/ sector 1;
end: cyl 64/ head 15/ sector 63
The data for partition 2 is:
sysid 165 (0xa5),(FreeBSD/NetBSD/386BSD)
start 65583, size 312516225 (152595 Meg), flag 0
beg: cyl 65/ head 1/ sector 1;
end: cyl 852/ head 15/ sector 63
The data for partition 3 is:
<UNUSED>
The data for partition 4 is:

Here is >df

$ df

Filesystem 512-blocks Used Avail Capacity Mounted on
/dev/md0 80302 77558 2744 97% /
devfs 2 2 0 100% /dev
/dev/ad4s2 302676996 77243508 201219332 28% /mnt/multimedia
/dev/ad4s1 39982 39108 874 98% /cf

Have I done something stupid?

I am not a BSD person, Gentoo is normally my thing!

Or what should I do to correct this?

cheers

P

EDIT

My Via system used a 256MB DIMM, I found and fitted a 512MB DIMM and restarted.

All was working until I rescanned the database then:-

Feb 1 12:21:52 kernel: pid 1303 (mysqld), uid 80 inumber 8283 on /: filesystem full
Feb 1 12:21:55 kernel: pid 1303 (mysqld), uid 80 inumber 8283 on /: filesystem full

Slimserver didn't completely crash, but it stopped serving the Squeezebox.

So brute force memory expansion does not appear to be the answer!

[superpat999]

Hi,

I re-intalled Freenas and Slimnas and slimserver from scratch, using my 512MB DIMM.

I copied my music folder back onto the share, (36,7GB) It copied over my 100Mbps Lan at 50-70 Mbps (pretty good average speed!)

I then did a complete scan of the music, with the squeezebox off

I had NO errors and the scan completed OK.

I am now listening to softsqueeze as I type this.

Checking the FreeNas status pages I currently see:

Memory usage 33%
Load averages 0.03, 0.06, 0.04 [show process information]

The only thing left that I don't like is this error I get occasionally in the system log:-

kernel: ad4: TIMEOUT - READ_DMA retrying (1 retry left) LBA=77583

I have read lots of threads in the FreeNas forums about this. I have found that setting the ATA type in Freenas to 100 appears to minimise this error. I only seem to get the one at start up now.

All in all it is not a great sacrifice to switch off the squeezebox when I need to scan the database.

cheers for now

Patrick

[tommypeters]

BTW, if you haven't seen it, SlimNAS 0.2 has been out for a while.