System disabled/SBS gone awry. Pls help!

[epoch1970]

You'll have to do this as root, then.
1) "sudo find / -xdev -name *desktop.ful"
Will look for files named something-desktop.ful (got that pattern from your original post) and print when it finds a location. Find will search the whole drive, give it time.
2) For each line that was printed, run "sudo rm -rf <full path>"
Make sure the path is correct and absolute, that is starting with / and containing no space or funny characters like '*' or '/' !
- #rm -rf /tmp/foo/desktop.ful (a subdir in /tmp --ok)
- #rm -rf tmp/foo/desktop.ful (a subdir named tmp in the current location --oops ?)
- #rm -rf /tmp/some dir/desktop.ful (2 deletion commands: i. subdir "some" in /tmp and ii. directory "dir" in the current location --doh!)

Under the shell you escape funny chars with a backslash most of the time. like in "some\ dir".

To avoid tragic mistakes, you can take some or all of these precautions:
a) use "ls" instead of "rm -rf" to test the path. If it says "no such file or directory" you got the path wrong
b) Use the terminal window and the graphical file navigator window; In the terminal start a line with "sudo rm -rf " (the final space is important. Don't type return now). Now click through to each location indicated by find and drag and drop the "desktop.ful" folder in the terminal window. This will print the absolute path with all escapes needed. Now press return, and it should work.
c) Use "rm -rfi " which asks before deleting each file.
d) Protect your music library (and other valuable data) before deleting stuff. "sudo chattr -R +i /path/to/music" will make all files immutable. Like on a CD-Rom. Even root can't delete them. So once the deed is done you'll need to run "sudo chattr -R -i /path/to/music" to reinstate normal use.

Have fun.

[Gus]

maybe you have to use the terminal cp to the the trash and use sudo rm -rf there

I'm not very comfortable with terminal. Would the command be somthing like sudo rm -rf /path/trash/?

Also, I realised that I still haven't figured out how to get port 9000 to connect with SBS - which I need to do to identify the paths to my backup files. Any suggestions there?

Sorry about the v rudimentary skills! All this help is very much appreciated!

EDIT - SHOULD CLARIFY - I HADN'T SEEN THE NOTE ABOVE FROM EPOCH1970 WHEN I POSTED THIS (HADN'T NOTICED THE THREAD HAD RUN TO A THIRD PAGE)

[Gus]

epoch1970 and Mnyb - thanks for sticking with me through this. Your guidance with the rm command made me comfortable enough to take the plunge and I've now got 290gb space back! Thanks so much!!
Now trying to figure out how to get port 9000 to link to SBS, so I can check use the browser and determine the locations for the plugins and prefs and back them up.
I really appreciate all the help so far. I feel like I'm close to getting it all up and running.

[Gus]

In case this helps shed further light on my machine's stuffed-upedness...

Package: squeezeboxserver
Status: install ok installed
Priority: optional
Section: sound
Installed-Size: 88352
Maintainer: Logitech/Slim Devices <debian@slimdevices.com>
Architecture: all
Version: 7.5.1
Replaces: slimp3, slimserver, squeezecenter
Depends: perl (>= 5.8.8), mysql-server-4.1 | mysql-server-5.0 | mysql-server-5.1, libmysqlclient14-dev | libmysqlclient15-dev | libmysqlclient16-dev, mysql-client-4.1 | mysql-client-5.0 | mysql-client-5.1, adduser
Conflicts: slimp3, slimserver, squeezecenter
Conffiles:
/etc/squeezeboxserver/modules.conf 25f1a87c60515cad6bbd464f639c709b
/etc/squeezeboxserver/slimservice-convert.conf 32a8c6709f238edffb043044a9f2138a
/etc/squeezeboxserver/types.conf 6223ab2ddb6620722fc8fee3c89d6532
/etc/squeezeboxserver/convert.conf 1e8be4b1a54e2259c9cd98ba3b47f904
/etc/default/squeezeboxserver 7ea65cdca95e099254890d9b85ae585c
/etc/logrotate.d/squeezeboxserver 1e1e60b156a199052fdfdea28868ad80
/etc/init.d/squeezeboxserver 22341011e27769f1a797ce96c405deb3
Description: Streaming Audio Server

[Mnyb]

epoch1970 and Mnyb - thanks for sticking with me through this. Your guidance with the rm command made me comfortable enough to take the plunge and I've now got 290gb space back! Thanks so much!!
Now trying to figure out how to get port 9000 to link to SBS, so I can check use the browser and determine the locations for the plugins and prefs and back them up.
I really appreciate all the help so far. I feel like I'm close to getting it all up and running.

From where internally or from an external computer ??

Internally from firefox for example.

http://localhost:9000

http://127.0.0.1:9000


From another pc.

http://<your server ip>:9000 (example my server http://192.168.1.5:9000)

If it's just from an external PC you can use for example firestarter on Ubunto to configure it's firewall for port 9000 tcp and port 3483 tcp/udp .

or some other means to do it, but ubuntu does have a firewall it's built in in the linux kernel.

[Gus]

Hmmm.

I'm trying it from the actual computer and tried using both localhost and 127.0.0.1 but in both cases I get the "can't to establish a connection" message. SO am thinking the port is somehow disabled.

[epoch1970]

Did you restart the machine now you've got free space, and try connecting to the SB Server ?

Once this is done, does the ps command show many processes as in message #14, or still a single one like in your message #10 ?

If SBS is still not running as it should, I stand by the hypothesis of a corrupted preference file (msg. #18.)
This is merely a guess on my part.

Maybe the server log can provide guidance on what to do next. You could open a large terminal window (a wide window makes long lines more readable), and a normal one then:
- In the small terminal window, type: "sudo /etc/init.d/squeezeboxserver stop" to stop SBS
- In the large terminal window, type: "sudo tail -f /var/log/squeezeboxserver/server.log" to print in the window any new line that will come to that file.
- In the small window, type: "sudo /etc/init.d/squeezeboxserver start" to start SBS. And traces should start printing in the large window.

When then dust has settled in the large window, you can stop SBS again. Alternative, stop "tail" from reading the file (in the large window, hit control-C and this will kill "tail".)

Copy-paste to here if you see something that looks like errors at startup.

[ncarver]

Also, I realised that I still haven't figured out how to get port 9000 to connect with SBS - which I need to do to identify the paths to my backup files. Any suggestions there?

I think your language is confusing people. When SBS starts properly it will open a socket that listens for connections on port 9000. That is how the "connection" between SBS and the port is made. You can see if SBS is actually listening on the port with the netstat command that you tried earlier. What that command showed was that it was NOT. This means that SBS is not running properly (the ps command also showed that "safe" variant running and did not show the required subprocesses, which again means not running properly).

The simplest thing I would try first is to stop the "safe" SBS and then simply restart SBS manually and see if it now works since you have opened up space. If it still does not, then indeed something in its config files is probably messed up as a result of your full filesystem. Then you may need to reinstall it as was suggested.

So first try "sudo /etc/init.d/squeezeboxserver stop" and then use the ps command you used earlier to see if that has gotten rid of that squeezeboxserver_safe. If it did not, then do "sudo kill -9 PID" (where PID is the process ID of that process, which you find using ps).

Once you can get that process to terminate, try restarting SBS manually: "sudo /etc/init.d/squeezeboxserver start" and now use the previous ps and netstat commands to see if multiple processes are running and it is listening on port 9000. If so then try connecting with your browser. If not, something must be corrupted in the SBS files and you will have to repair it. Of course, keep track of any error messages you might get when trying to start SBS and let us know.

[Gus]

I've finally had a chance to sit down and try to work through this.

I decided it would be worth simply purging and trying a clean install (sudo aptitude purge, then sudo aptitude install).

But it still won't connect:
when I open the web brower, I get "Firefox can't establish a connection to the server at 127.0.0.1:9000" or "Firefox can't establish a connection to the server at localhost:9000"

I would have thought that that would have fixed it! Ouch!

[epoch1970]

Tough. Is there anything worth mentioning in the log files ?