FAT32 maximum drive size and Firefly

[Anonymous]

Hello all!

First and foremost I’d like to tell you Ron my gratitude for the very good days of music I had thanks firefly, I have not better words to thank you and your work.

My scenario: NSLU (fast version already, so not un-underclocked) unslung 6.8 with firmware V2.3R63 to Memorex Cool Drive B 1gb memory stick on USB port 2, USB2 hard disk on USB 1 with plenty of uncompressed wav and aiff files and some AAC and mp3 too on the server side. The client is a Roku Soundbridge 1000 and the Firefly version the nightly snv-1586….

Yes… I was not very explicative about the hard disk containing my music, tha’s because I need to elaborate: I formatted the hd containing my music FAT32 because I need it to be accesible from my Powerbook G4. Transfering my ripped cds (lots of 44.1, 16 – bits files) via samba is a pain in the ass. Since now I had a Maxtor 40gb HD, and the whole system worked fine week after week. BUT! I decided to add the rest of my music collection and got a formatted FAT32 LaCie 500gb (the hd is a Seagate)….

My problem: the slug starts normally (apparently) an so starts the firefly server, but on file scanning the server hangs and freezes the slug too. In fact I have no access to the web interface of the slug because the admin-admin is rejected… no telnet…. nothing. The only thing I could is shutdown the slug from the power button.
I tried twice with same result, and suspect about problems managing partitions this size.

Someone else had same behaviour?

Help (please, please)?, hints?

Thanks a lot!

p.d. last nightly hangs also the whole server

[Anonymous]

Hi all again!

Well, I had the whole day to test and realized that my smart list (songs.db) was the cause of the problem. I removed it and firefly remains stable playing music, BUT I need the smart playlist because plain WAVs and AIFs don’t support tags (btw: is there any way to implement it with aifs and wavs other than a playlist based on file names????). The playlist I built was almost 1100 records (!!!), so is there any way to reuse it? Putting the old database in the directory where firefly stores the database worked with my old setup, but not now.

More troubles: i started with a new smart playlist choosing several of the directorys in the HD, run a scan and in 2 of them the files were lost and replaced with other huge size files with names such “07b~1.aif” where I had “07-He was despised.aif” for instance. I got also several files named “usbc” in these damaged directorys.

I’m scared about losing my digitized music collection and having to rip again all the cds because this slug behaviour.

Thanks for your help!!

[rpedde]

@JuanLu wrote:

Well, I had the whole day to test and realized that my smart list (songs.db) was the cause of the problem. I removed it and firefly remains stable playing music, BUT I need the smart playlist because plain WAVs and AIFs don’t support tags (btw: is there any way to implement it with aifs and wavs other than a playlist based on file names????). The playlist I built was almost 1100 records (!!!), so is there any way to reuse it? Putting the old database in the directory where firefly stores the database worked with my old setup, but not now.

That should still work. Check the web admin and make sure that you have “enable playlists” and “enable itunes” set to yes.

More troubles: i started with a new smart playlist choosing several of the directorys in the HD, run a scan and in 2 of them the files were lost and replaced with other huge size files with names such “07b~1.aif” where I had “07-He was despised.aif” for instance. I got also several files named “usbc” in these damaged directorys.

I’m scared about losing my digitized music collection and having to rip again all the cds because this slug behaviour.

This is almost certainly not a firefly thing — it only ever opens music files as read-only, so even if it hangs or something, it shouldn’t corrupt the file system.

The hang may well have been the usb stick. Did you set up the usb to minimize writes to flash, and move the firefly db off the flash and onto the usb? That will probably help flash longevity.

[Anonymous]

@rpedde wrote:

This is almost certainly not a firefly thing — it only ever opens music files as read-only, so even if it hangs or something, it shouldn’t corrupt the file system.

The hang may well have been the usb stick. Did you set up the usb to minimize writes to flash, and move the firefly db off the flash and onto the usb? That will probably help flash longevity.

No, you are right… will try this night..
btw (I know this is a slug thing, not firefly) when the flash get corrupted is enough to do a fsck.ext3 to restore?

Thanks again!!!

[rpedde]

@JuanLu wrote:

@rpedde wrote:

This is almost certainly not a firefly thing — it only ever opens music files as read-only, so even if it hangs or something, it shouldn’t corrupt the file system.

The hang may well have been the usb stick. Did you set up the usb to minimize writes to flash, and move the firefly db off the flash and onto the usb? That will probably help flash longevity.

No, you are right… will try this night..
btw (I know this is a slug thing, not firefly) when the flash get corrupted is enough to do a fsck.ext3 to restore?

Thanks again!!!

I would think so. Also, I should have mentioned, it’s possible that the DB gets corrupted on a crash or bad shutdown. So it might be worth just whacking the songs.db and letting it build it again from scratch (on the hdd, not the flash!).

Here is a page on tuning the slug for root on flash: http://www.nslu2-linux.org/wiki/Unslung/Ext3flash

Good luck.

— Ron

[Anonymous]

Well… it seems to be a Unslung6.8 related problem cos other users are having this “terrorist” behaviour with the Slug… I’ll move to Debian… hope I don’t cry for my files, otherwise I’m going to destroy the slug…. 👿

[rpedde]

@JuanLu wrote:

Well… it seems to be a Unslung6.8 related problem cos other users are having this “terrorist” behaviour with the Slug… I’ll move to Debian… hope I don’t cry for my files, otherwise I’m going to destroy the slug…. 👿

Debian is where it’s at anyway. 🙂

— Ron

[Anonymous]

@rpedde wrote:

@JuanLu wrote:

Well… it seems to be a Unslung6.8 related problem cos other users are having this “terrorist” behaviour with the Slug… I’ll move to Debian… hope I don’t cry for my files, otherwise I’m going to destroy the slug…. 👿

Debian is where it’s at anyway. 🙂

— Ron

😯 😆

I’m really happy now: no more file lost! I can trust the slug with Debian to manage my music library.

🙂

only a question: I’m rebiulding editing via web interface my smart playlist because the list was ordered with folder names like

0001 Bach…..
0034 Mozart…
0450 Bill Evans….

and I’m changing to

Bach…. (0001)
Mozart… (0034)
Bill Evans…. (0450)

and each edit takes more than 30 min. of HD rattling and slug thinking !!!!

The play list is more than 600 items and the database is sqlite (not sqlite3).

Is this for normal.. so long time to perform the edit?

Otherwise I’m very happy with Firefly… 1000 thanks again Ron!!!!!

[rpedde]

@JuanLu wrote:

and each edit takes more than 30 min. of HD rattling and slug thinking !!!!

The play list is more than 600 items and the database is sqlite (not sqlite3).

Is this for normal.. so long time to perform the edit?

Otherwise I’m very happy with Firefly… 1000 thanks again Ron!!!!!

That seems kind of excessive. It might be that on something like a slug, it would make more sense to turn off the background scans (particularly when you are doing big updates like that), and then either turn it back on after you are done, or just leave it off and force a scan through the web interface when you are done adding or editing.

— ROn

[Anonymous]

@rpedde wrote:

@JuanLu wrote:

and each edit takes more than 30 min. of HD rattling and slug thinking !!!!

The play list is more than 600 items and the database is sqlite (not sqlite3).

Is this for normal.. so long time to perform the edit?

Otherwise I’m very happy with Firefly… 1000 thanks again Ron!!!!!

That seems kind of excessive. It might be that on something like a slug, it would make more sense to turn off the background scans (particularly when you are doing big updates like that), and then either turn it back on after you are done, or just leave it off and force a scan through the web interface when you are done adding or editing.

— ROn

may be a slug issue because I lost connection also via ssh (timeout connection) until Firefly finished the edit (a loooooong time)…. brrrrrr

suggestions?

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