Archive for June, 2005

Over the past couple of days I have regained interest in getting Music Player Daemon working on Scummbox.

On it’s own, MPD isn’t very useful as it will only really play music through the sound card that is local to the linux box that it’s installed on. But when you configure it to use Icecast2 interesting things are possible.

And I think I’m close to those interesting things. If everything works correctly, then I should be able to control a icecast stream remotely. This means that we can have a stream run through the downstairs computer through the stereo system, and not have to run upstairs to change tracks or to see who a particular song is by.

Beyond that, it means that I could tune in at work or at a remote location (someone elses house, etc.) and stream music in and control the playlist in real time! Hotness!

I’m just having some stickyness with getting MPD to mesh with Icecast nicely. Hopefully soon I’ll have it licked!

<update> I have it licked! All it took were a couple of config changes and running mpd –update-db (as the music database was hella stale) and voila! Working Scummbox Radio! The web interface is working like a champ! I am *so* stoked about this! </update>

So for some reason scummbox decided to die (for all intents and purposes) sometime between 7:45am and me getting to work. It was not responding to the network. Not even VNCing into my desktop and accessing it localy worked. Crap.

Luckily iolarah was on MSN at the time, so I got her to go into my office and hard reset the server.

Nothing.

She offers to go in and connect my second monitor to the server. Excellent! I also get her to turn on my main monitor so she can type what is happening into notepad, and I can reply in the same fashon via VNC. It turns out that the keyboard wasn’t plugged in properly, so she restarts it again.

Slightly better response this time. The server starts booting, but ends up stopping at “Starting Postfix”. I have her wait a bit, and still nothing. Crap. I’m starting to worry about the hard drive at this point.

Third reboot is a charm, luckily. I get the line “it says ‘pants login:’ now.” Sweet! So thanks to AT&T Labs UK (and the folks at TightVNC) and iolarah, The server is back up and running!

This post reminds me that I should go paw through logs to see what happened in the first place though…

So at long last e-mail returns to scummbox! One of my co-workers at the ISP added the mail server here as a redirect for e-mail (so if you nslookup -type=mx scummbox.org you’ll see the ISP’s mail servers as the MX servers) to an insane port (15587, I believe). This allows me to recieve e-mail even though Satanico filters port 25.

So that’s all very painless. Postfix is sending and recieving mail fine (I hijacked smtp1.sympatico.ca as my outgoing server… I’m evil.) But that’s not good enough. I want webmail.

So I go find my favorite (and super easy to set up) PHP webmail program: Squirrelmail and get it installed and configured. Easy and painless. But wait! What’s this? The test script dies while checking IMAP? Crap! What IMAP server is installed here, anyway? A bit of poking and looking up on the internet later, I find that the University of Washington IMAP server (2002) is installed. I’m baffled. Everyone is down with PINE (UW’s most famous product) but this, this is not so good.

So now I get to play with URPMI (a great tool, if your mirror files are up-to-date… which mine arn’t.) I grab Cyrus IMAP. No dice. I grab Courier IMAP. I get a nibble. The test script can connect on port 143, but nothing past that. Logging in is crap. So I turn to my other favorite tool, RPMFind.net. From there, I go through the list again: Cyrus then Courier. This time (after a LOT of poking and finally figuring out that I had installed un-needed authentication packages) things seem to go better.

Now Courier IMAP (the newest version) is running and the test script says “Everything’s go, boss!” I (mistakenly) think that “Woo! The worst is over!” Wrong. I can’t view my mail in Squirrelmail. After googling for an hour, I find out that Courier IMAP uses Maildir (A seperate file for every e-mail) and my configuration of Postfix uses a flat file (all the e-mail gets appended to the end of a spool file) and try as I might, I couldn’t get postfix to forward to the Maildir. I honestly must have tried for an hour to get it to work.

So, I go onto RPMFind, grab UW IMAP 2004, uninstall Courier, install UW, make sure IMAP is started at boot and reboot scummbox. Voila! E-mail in my inbox!

So, for future refrence: Mandrake + Postfix + UW IMAP + Squirrelmail = happy webmail solution!