iTunes Server Part 2
My one Linux server died over the weekend. Not to worry I didn’t lose (much :-\) data. However, it did leave me with an interesting problem–it was my iTunes Server. The drive with the MP3s was external and just fine but I now had no Linux server to play it with, and it had to be Linux server because I was using mt-daapd to serve up the files and because I need to make thing difficult teh drive was formatted with ext3. My only two options were my Windows box (Yeah I got one. Have to play Battlefront on something) and my FreeNAS. The Macs were not really an option since in my setup they are supposed to be the clients. FreeNAS with its support of ext3 seemed to be the most logical choice. The only problem is that it’s Free BSD, and a minimal Free BSD at that. I did not foresee an installation going smoothly. Sadly, it is my impression that the FreeNAS development team has no intention on putting daapd on it since they are trying to shy away from “proprietary” protocols, and focus more on standard/common protocols. To my knowledge there was no version of mt-daapd for Windows even though it could theoretically support the ext3 filesystem. Turns out my assumption was wrong, sort of. Mt-daapd does exist for Windows as Firefly Media Server. However, it is not officially supported yet, and I needed to get the nightly build. One pre-requisite is that you have to install Apple’s Bonjour for Windows as it does not include rendezvous as the Linux version of mt-daapd does. I still wanted to mount the MP3 drive on my FreeNAS since I didn’t feel comfortable with a Windows ext3 driver over the longhaul, and it just makes sense to have all my network storage in one place. The plan: Mount the drive to the FreeNAS, map the drive on Windows, install firefly, point it at the mapped drive and hopefully pump out 16,000 MP3s all over the house. Now you may ask yourself why didn’t I just install iTunes on the Windows box? Answer: It wouldn’t have been as cool, and too much overhead (i.e. having to fire up iTunes and leave it running all the time when I only want to use one feature of it). A simple server seemed a more sane choice. The Firefly install was painless although I did have to kind of kick start the scanning process. Although, once I got it going it scanned the whole drive, and is not sharing the huge main library without any problems so far. The one thing I have to find out is if it automatically updates if you add MP3s to the drive or if you need to force a re-scan. The reason all this is important to you is if you want and iTunes sever, don’t want to run iTunes on said server, and don’t want to Monkey around with Linux, this may be the path for you to go. You don’t even have to monkey around with FreeNAS either. Just attach your MP3 drive to your Windows box.
By the way, Firefly is also available for OS X and has web interface just as mt-daapd does although both the Sharing and web server are on a different port than mt-daapd.
One more thing. Don’t forget to punch the appropriate hole in your Windows firewall.
