Firefly on Conceptronic CH3WNAS

[Anonymous]

I’m thinking about buying another NAS and I must say I like the conceptronic CH3WNAS. Is there anybody who has installed firefly on it yet?

[Anonymous]

Evilripper will be along shortly. 😉 He’s got a CH3WNAS, and knows how to use it. 😀

[EVILRipper]

Haha. Nice. 😀

Well. Almost. I have a CH3SNAS. The CH3WNAS is wireless slightly different.
I did a quick check. Mine has firefly pre-installed. (Not that I didn’t install a newer version). Yours doesn’t.

But that doesn’t mean you can’t. There is a “hack” which you can use to fully unlock the CH3WNAS.
It’s called a fun_plug. It’s a small perl script which is run at boot. Making code execution possible, you can telnet into it.

About the next few lines I’m not 100% sure, but that’s what I understood:
After telnetting, you can ‘chroot’ into a fresh base linux install to emulate a linux environment inside the OS itself. (using busybox)
This makes it possible to install your own software and run it. Thus unlocking a full linux ‘PC’. Install firefly is one of the possibilities at this point.

But, as you can see, it will take a little effort to get firefly to run on the CH3WNAS. But it’s possible.
If you’re not really into linux and/or don’t want to do all that, I’d suggest you look at something else.

Links:
http://dsmg600.info/
http://dsmg600.info/howto:fun_plug
http://dsmg600.info/howto:firefly (Look! It even has his own ‘how to install firefly’ page. But it has as requirement to have fun_plugged it first)

Hope this helps with your decision. 🙂

[Anonymous]

Oops I did mention the wrong product-code, I actually meant CH3SNAS. Evilripper thanks for your response sofar. I will make an other topic on de CH3SNAS, maybe you will be so kind to share the installation you did for firefly?

Yesterday I went on searching after posting the message and found the following for the CH3WNAS, maybe this also works for the CH3SNAS:
From michael-peeters.blogspot.com
I managed to get FireFly running om my CH3WNAS. It’s fairly easy if you’re not afraid of the command line :-). I was wrong in my post yesterday: you do NOT need Gentoo in order to run firefly! Gentoo is apparently only needed if you want to build FireFly from the sources.

The info in http://dsmg600.info/howto:firefly contains too much steps for the CH3WNAS.

This is the ‘real’ way to setup firefly on CH3WNAS:

enable telnet in fun_plug: http://www.aroundmyroom.com/2008/01/03/ch3wnas-enabling-telnet/
download the latest build of FireFly for the CH3WNAS: http://willie-wortel.nl/ch3wnas/ch3wnas-ff-1696.tgz. Unzip the build onto the NAS. (/mnt/HD_a2)

I renamed the main directory from /mnt/HD_a2/firefly-1696 to /mnt/HD_a2/firefly. This is consequent with the config.
edit the following line in /mnt/HD_a2/firefly/mtdaapd.conf file (e.g. with ftp):
mp3_dir = /mnt/HD_a2/media
–> replace media with the root-directory to your mp3s.
–> check out the other options like default admin password if you wish.

add the following lines to your fun_plug:
#kill legacy upnp (if you don’t use the upnp 😉
kill -9 `pidof upnp`

#start firefly
rm -f /mnt/HD_a2/firefly/var/cache/mt-daapd/*
/mnt/HD_a2/firefly/sbin/mt-daapd -c /mnt/HD_a2/firefly/mt-daapd.conf
As you can see, I completely remove the DB before starting FireFly up. This is because while I was testing, the DB went corrupt after a reboot. The indexing at startup is very fast (4000 mp3s in 64 seconds) so this isn’t really a problem, I think. Maybe there are more elegant ways to prevent corruption of the DB?

I tested it with Rhythmbox under Ubuntu 8.04 & it works like a charm :-). Make sure the “Multicast DNS service discovery” service (= mDNS) is running in Ubuntu (System/Administration/services) and that the “daap plugin” is checked in rhythmbox (edit/plugins). I’m seriously considering buying the Roku (Pinnacle) Soundbridge now…

Other tips:

check out the FireFly admin pages in your browser: go to port 3689 of your CH3WNAS:
e.g. http://192.168.1.30:3689/ user: admin; password: mt-daapd (default)
you can follow the logs in /var/log/mt-daapd.log (maybe not the best location :-/):
tail -f /var/log/mt-daapd.log

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