Kev’s Blog – Page 200 – Kev's Development Toolbox

December 31, 2012

Iomega ix2-200: High disk activity and low throughput from clients

My ix2-200 box has been doing a lot of thrashing for a while, each time that I turn it on. I though for a while that this was just some disk indexing going on, but it seemed more recently that it was everytime I powered it on.

SSH’ing into the box and taking a look in some log files I found these messages repeating every couple of minutes, in the /var/log/soho.log file:

2012/12/31 12:48:02.764433: executord[892.40d6e2a0]: (1324) WARNING: Restarting 'mt-daapd' due to excess memory usage (198598656 used, 67108864 allowed)
2012/12/31 12:48:02.962593: executord[892.40d6e2a0]: (1245) DIAGNOSTIC: restarting process 'mt-daapd'.
2012/12/31 12:48:58.426400: executord[892.40d6e2a0]: (1528) DIAGNOSTIC: Started mt-daapd[14707]
2012/12/31 12:48:58.538179: executord[892.40d6e2a0]: (1371) DIAGNOSTIC: Signal received with no commands

Searching for mt-daapd I found this post that described similar behavior. I followed the steps to edit the daap.conf file (mine was located in a different location, here: /mnt/soho_storage/media) and removed all the filetypes for the extensions setting except .mp3, .m4a and .m4p.

That seems to have done it. Once the service restarted again, it hasn’t since turned up in the log file for the last hour or so that I’ve been watching. This makes sense if that indexer has issues with large files, since I primarily use this box to keep copies of our home movies, all of which as in .mp4 format, and most of the files are large, ~ 1 GB each.

The good news it that also seems to have given back some performance – file transfers are now pretty snappy, whereas before it seemed they were dragging unnecessarily slowly.

December 8, 2012

Installing XBMC media center on a HP Mini netbook

I’ve been setting up XBMC media center on an old HP Mini netbook as an experiment to listen to streaming radio via my home theatre setup. I started initially with the XBMCbuntu iso since it was the easiest to setup, but the Ubuntu side of this distro was too slimmed down for my liking. It didn’t come with drivers for the wifi card out of the box, so while I was planning on connecting via ethernet close to my home theatre setup, I still wanted to pickup the netbook and use wifi while working on setting it up.

So my next attempt I went for a full Ubuntu 12.10 desktop install (wifi drivers included), and then followed the manual steps to install XMBC next.

My main interest in XMBC is the Radio Add-on that has a menu of selectable streaming radio stations. My next interest is being able to control the radio selection remotely, either via a web interface or via an Android app. All the web interfaces, including the default interface, don’t seem to let you browse the Radio add-on. I’ve found one Android XMBC remote that does, so this one does what I need:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ch.berard.xbmcremotebeta

My next interest is running Spotify on the netbook and also controlling it remotely. Two choices here, either

Use a Spotify Add on for XBMC, like Spotimc
Or install the Spotify for Linux client, and then use one of the many Spotify remote apps to control it directly

Given that I haven’t had much luck with XBMC remotes controlling XBMC add-ons, I’m going to try a separate Spotify install and then try out one of the remote apps, like this one: Spotcommander. I’ll post an update once I’ve got these installed and configured.