@jae_63 wrote:
My system is behaving much like what’s described in this Microsoft KB article:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/815304
Don’t forget to check you have latest bios. Lots of those type of problems are related to BIOS as well. As well as ACPI. Sometimes there are some ACPI settings you can frob in BIOS that help.
Of course, you’ve probably already tried all that, so…
So … my questions are:
(1) Is their any way (preferably via a CGI script) to “tickle” either iTunes or Firefly or Bonjour so that the iTunes or Firefly library will be listed in a remote iTunes or Soundbridge?
Well, you could try hard-starting bonjour and firefly… something like:
net stop “Firefly Media Server”
net stop “Bonjour”
net start “Bonjour”
net start “Firefly Media Server”
might do it, for example.
(2) Can someone please explain the mechanism by which iTunes and/or Firefly “advertise their wares?” This seems to require a more active role than, say, listening to port 80 for an HTTP connection.
Thanks in advance for any advice.
Ya, it works by multicast. Firefly tells the bonjour service that it has services it wants to advertise to the network. Bonjour is really a DNS server, only multicast based.
When iTunes starts up, it does a multicast query for services of type _daap._tcp (or _rsp._tcp, in the case of the soundbridge — they use different protocols).
Bonjour should see the request, and reply that there is a daap service running on the machine (since firefly registered with it).
From there, the soundbridge/iTunes queries for machine details, gets an ip address and port, and connects.
You know, it could also be NIC driver, forgetting to re-enable multicast when it comes out of sleep. Upgrading the nic driver might be a thought, too.
Anyway, the resolution protocol is properly called mDNS (multicast dns). I’d guess wikipedia has more a cogent description of it than I can do.
I’d sure try the driver/bios/etc round before trying to contact microsoft, though… who knows, might even work. 🙂
— Ron