SlimServer not scanning

[khuongkt]

Hello,

I'm having problems getting SlimServer to scan my music folder on MEPISLite. I'm pretty sure the directory is correct (it would say otherwise if it weren't, I've checked), and I've tried multiple locations on both an IDE and USB drive. At first, I tried connecting my existing music disk (NTFS) as a slave drive to my boot disk. MEPIS appropriately assigned the label 'hdb1' to it, so the location should be /mnt/hdb1. Later I attempted the same through an IDE-to-USB adapter (/mnt/flash), and then again by copying one song to the /root/Documents folder (partition formated in the native ext3 file system). Every time the disk fails to spin, and within seconds SlimServer would report 0 albums/songs/artists on the home page. This is on a new system based around a VIA EPIA motherboard with a 40GB Seagate 7200.7 OS disk and the latest stable versions of software.

Can anybody give an insight into what's wrong? Thanks.

[bukharin]

2 things to try:

1) Are you sure that the drive is mounted at /mnt/hdb1? Most distributions wouldn't mount /dev/hdb1 there. Check that you can see the music files with a file manager (or ls on the command line).

2) You could try scanning from the command line, with debugging options set. For example:
/path/to/scanner.pl --rescan --cleanup --d_scan /mnt/hdb1/

[Mark Lanctot]

At least on Debian-based distros, mounted external drives appear at /media/sdXY where X = a, b, c, etc. and Y = 1, 2, 3, etc.

Also does SlimServer have permission to read from the external drive? I tried several times to do it the "right" way, i.e. give user slimserver permissions to read, but I guess I really don't understand user-specific permissions, so I just chmod 777 the drive.

[khuongkt]

Thank you both for the replies.

Indeed, all my internal/external drives (save the active Linux partition) are mounted at /mnt, and there's no such directory as /media. (I've checked using both the file manager and the command line.) One oddity is that while the external drive is labeled 'sda1' on the desktop, its actual location is /mnt/flash. While logged in as root, I tried the command "chmod 777 flash" and got this message:

chmod: changing permissions of 'flash': Read-only file system.

Its current permissions are dr-x------, and I can't change it any other way. As for the internal drives, I've changed their permissions once before (though without using 777), and when I checked today, they reverted back! I did 777 this time around... are they going to stick?

bukharin, I got this message when I executed that command:

bash: path/to/scanner.pl: No such file or directory.

Do I need to be in a specific directory to do that?

[Mark Lanctot]

chmod: changing permissions of 'flash': Read-only file system.

You sure it isn't NTFS-formatted? Looking at your original message, I'm not sure.

[khuongkt]

Mark, it is NTFS-formatted, but can't Linux write to NTFS (maybe not reliably, but still)?

[khuongkt]

OK, I just updated to 6.5.3 and still no changes to the scanning behavior. I must admit, though, that the MEPISLite beta I'm running is a bit wonky. Sometimes there are discrepancies between what the file manager shows and what the command line shows with respect to folder contents. The CLI at times displays what used to be there and not what is there. Still, I've made sure that my music is recognized in both places. Also, my reconnected external drive now carries the label 'sda1' and not 'flash' anymore, which should have been the case earlier.

Should I just migrate to a different distro? This scanning issue is the last obstacle in getting my file/music server going, so I'd like to stay with Linux if I can.

[egd]

Should I just migrate to a different distro? This scanning issue is the last obstacle in getting my file/music server going, so I'd like to stay with Linux if I can.

If you're looking for an easy/user friendly out of the box distribution I'd recommend Ubuntu or Kubuntu. (most) Linux distros will not allow writing to NTFS partitions out of the box. To write to NTFS you need to install NTFS-3G from http://www.ntfs-3g.org/

should you opt for U/Kubuntu, ubuntuguide.org is an excellent reference point for figuring out how to do things most users are likely to want to do, but may not be familiar with in a Linux environment.

In regards to mounting USB drives, assuming a FAT32 formatted USB HDD shows up as /dev/sdd1 and you want to mount it as /media/sdd1, the following fstab entry will mount the drive with read/write permission on insertion:

/dev/sdd1 /media/sdd1 vfat rw,user,iocharset=utf8,umask=000 0 0

I'm not sure what the syntax would be for NTFS though I would presume it would be identical other that substituting vfat with whatever the NTFS-3G driver expects, which I'm guessing is "ntfs" --- you'd need to check this though, I'm merely speculating as I've never tried writing to NTFS from Linux.

[khuongkt]

egd, I've tried Ubuntu and a couple derivatives (Xubuntu and Linux Mint) on this VIA system and others, and I often get CRC errors even with an official Ubuntu disk and a fresh HDD. More to the point, MEPISLite was chosen because it was the only one tested that worked with the VIA system.

Thanks for the tip on mounting drives in the /media folder. I will look into it.

[khuongkt]

I think I have a breakthrough here! SlimServer recognized a .mp3 test file I downloaded to /mnt/hdb2 (my Music partition). Apparently it skips through .flac files? Why is this?