Booting Slimserver in OS X ... from the command line

[trebejo]

Hi,

Ok, I figured out that the current setup is broken in a mysterious way (apparently since the latest upgrade in Tiger 10.4.5), but not in a hopeless way. I'd been running slimserver smoothly for about six months, and then yesterday, it wouldn't boot anymore.

Basically, when I click on "Start Server" in the System Preference pane, nothing happens. No perl, no nuthin'.

BUT if I go to a command line and type in

$ ~/Library/PreferencePanes/SlimServer.prefPane/Contents/server/slimserver.pl --daemon

then good ol' slimserver is back.

Since slim wasn't booting up, I did a thorough wipe and re-install of 6.2.1. Nothing. So I went up to the nightly 6.2.2. Nothing. Then I started digging around the directories, found a doc meant for linux users, and used it to come up with the command-line above.

Questions:

1) I switched from linux to macs for the effing gooey, dammit--why won't it work?

2) How about putting in some debugging info so that when this happens, the user gets something more useful than a non-response from the system? I got so much of nothing that I began to suspect (shudder) Network Issues. I even flirted with re-installing the OS. It's going to take a bottle of scotch to wipe away this trauma.

3) Should I run some other command in addition to or in place of the slimserver.pl line above, in order for slimserver to run properly?

Cheers,

Ariel

[netim3]

My experience was that the command line

~/Library/PreferencePanes/SlimServer.prefPane/Contents/server/slimserver.pl --daemon

wouldn't work for me unless I renamed SlimServer.prefPane to remove the '.' such that OSX treated it as a regular folder. Otherwise OSX didn't seem to recognise the path. I'm curious how you've solved that problem.

Of course, when I do so, the SlimServer preference pane icon disappears.


Could there be somethin common here - if you can run the command line above, might the pref pane item be partially diabled somehow?

[trebejo]

My experience was that the command line

~/Library/PreferencePanes/SlimServer.prefPane/Contents/server/slimserver.pl --daemon

wouldn't work for me unless I renamed SlimServer.prefPane to remove the '.' such that OSX treated it as a regular folder. Otherwise OSX didn't seem to recognise the path. I'm curious how you've solved that problem.

Of course, when I do so, the SlimServer preference pane icon disappears.


Could there be somethin common here - if you can run the command line above, might the pref pane item be partially diabled somehow?

Well, the plot thickens. I didn't do anything special--just used "show package contents" in Finder to help move around the directory, but Terminal always recognizes a directory as a directory.

As for characters in pathnames, I don't think periods are supposed to be a problem. Other characters, yes--blank spaces are a typical problem--but that's usually solved by putting a backslash before the problematic character.

At any rate, the preference pane continues to show up as such both in Finder and in System Preferences. And--this is a kicker--the "Stop Server" button works, even though its buddy "Start Server" doesn't.

If you've got all your latest upgrades and things are working fine, let me know.

Cheers,

Ariel

[danco]

As posted in the other thread, I've just installed the latest Tiger update, with some trepidation after your problems, and it's all working fine.

[kanoot]

Just to let you know, I've been using tiger and slimserver with no problems at all.

I will look and see if I can find such a thing on my system too - but let me suggest that you look around and try to find a cache file for the slimserver preference pane - or for all panes in general. Blowing that away might help if there is one.

I'll get back to you if I find such a beast.

[trebejo]

Just to let you know, I've been using tiger and slimserver with no problems at all.

I will look and see if I can find such a thing on my system too - but let me suggest that you look around and try to find a cache file for the slimserver preference pane - or for all panes in general. Blowing that away might help if there is one.

I'll get back to you if I find such a beast.

Hmmm... an intriguing suggestion. Apparently I've got some quirky thing going on because other users with the same OS upgrade haven't had the same problem. That's a relief.

So what files do you mean? I deleted the usual ~/Library/Caches/SlimServer directory before I started the round of reinstallations, of course. Do you mean either of these files?

~/Library/Caches/com.apple.preferencepanes.cache
~/Library/Caches/com.apple.preferencepanes.searchindexcache

They are the only files in that directory that have recent revision dates. Is it safe to delete these wrt other apps on the preference pane?

btw this came up in the other thread I started as a result of this event, but I'll mention it here for completeness--I did the usual round of repairing permissions and deleting the *slim*.plist file.

Cheers,

Ariel

[kanoot]

Hmmm... an intriguing suggestion. Apparently I've got some quirky thing going on because other users with the same OS upgrade haven't had the same problem. That's a relief.

So what files do you mean? I deleted the usual ~/Library/Caches/SlimServer directory before I started the round of reinstallations, of course. Do you mean either of these files?

~/Library/Caches/com.apple.preferencepanes.cache
~/Library/Caches/com.apple.preferencepanes.searchindexcache

They are the only files in that directory that have recent revision dates. Is it safe to delete these wrt other apps on the preference pane?

Well, considering this is only a guess by me.... I dont know!

However, you might try copying those cache files to another directory, deleting the originals and restarting. If something is broken - put them back.

It just seemed to me that for your problem it was possible that and old cache might conflict with something new. Still, it was just a guess. Its a really odd problem that doesn't make a lot of sense.

I wonder if you encounter any errors when you try some of the preliminary shell scripts that are scattered throughout the Slim preference pane directory. There are a couple of server startup scripts that check for a running server and a running rendzvous(bonjour) instance. Perhaps you can try running those scripts from a terminal and see if the server starts up? Those are what are called from the buttons anyway.

I'll keep looking around too - this one is odd.

[trebejo]

Fixed it finally!

Ok, it all came down to deleting these two files:

~/Library/Caches/com.apple.preferencepanes.cache
~/Library/Caches/com.apple.preferencepanes.searchindexcache

which automatically get re-created when you click on "Start" in the preference pane button for slimserver.

For some reason, the files as they were were messing things up.

Thanks folks (and good eye kanoot, that was a sneaky one to catch).

So as far as I can tell, when gremlins got your mac and you don't want to do the windoze approach of wiping the OS and reinstalling (ugh), do these:

i) run disk utility and verify system drive and permissions
ii) wipe out the files as outlined in this post
iii) wipe out slimserver and reinstall it (I didn't have to do that this time)

I really, really think this has to go in some obvious place in the documentation (maybe even the little booklet that gets shipped with the squeezebox) so that people that are not comfortable with surfing around the directories in a mac can still use the device "just like a cd player".

I assume that this is more an OS issue than an application issue (although I don't know for sure), but it's still a robustness issue with the device and its server if something upstream breaks as mysteriously--and then gets fixed as easily--as this one did.

One plus I'll mention before I go--the staff at slimdevices reads these posts and pitches in when they know something. They will have less of that to do if they put this tip somewhere.

Cheers,

trebejo