scary music server

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The Stratmangler
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#16

Post by The Stratmangler »

I had a minor issue with my server lately - I was getting the occasional buffering issue with music files playing.
The buffering was occurring with CD spec files as well as anything up to 24/192 .

I ended up uninstalling Squeezebox Server altogether, removing all items related to Squeezebox, rebooting the server, and then reinstalling Squeezebox Server and running through the usual scans etc.

Sorted my problem out.

I wonder if you might benefit from an uninstall/reinstall with your server Ed?
Only problem is that your server needs you to dig into the registries of your NAS, whereas in my case Squeezebox Server is a supported app which can be invoked from a server borne web interface.

I have a vague recollection that your installation is an altogether more scary proposition, and demands Linux knowledge.
Chris :happy3:
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#17

Post by ed »

Many thanks for the all the suggestions chaps...it's great when you don't feel all alone and miles from civilization.

Ok...deep breath..

Chris, the problem is outside of slimserver, unless it was slimserver that told these particular files to go rogue in some way.

Brian, Very possible that it's a samba/win7 issue, but, when I couldn't see the files in explorer I had a look from the laptop on the network and that couldn't see the files either..that's XP.

Samba on it's own??? I dunno, why would it just pick odd files, and why would it wait 7 years to do it?

Nick, that was my very first thought when I discovered it...because for the whole time I've been running this server every time I loded up a foreign disc(read French) that had French characters in the file name, Linux stored the filename with a substitute character, usually tilda. So I discounted that theory. I'm well wise to character set issues after all the cross platform gremlins have attacked me, especially when I'm asleep.

Prompted by Chris' observation that the server is now very fragile...I'm not going to fiddle with the build anymore......If it stops for any reason, i.e a power cut, I have to go through such a procedure of file editing to stop it rebooting every five minutes.....I think it's time to move on..the distribution and kernel are well out of date and all the manual patching would take me an age to remember and re-read, and in the end may not be the problem......I've seen attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion, time to die

thanks again chaps
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#18

Post by Nick »

ed wrote: Prompted by Chris' observation that the server is now very fragile...I'm not going to fiddle with the build anymore......If it stops for any reason, i.e a power cut, I have to go through such a procedure of file editing to stop it rebooting every five minutes.....I think it's time to move on..the distribution and kernel are well out of date and all the manual patching would take me an age to remember and re-read, and in the end may not be the problem......I've seen attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion, time to die

thanks again chaps
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#19

Post by ed »

bit out of date here(read slow) but I'm pretty sure fsck will only check ext2 and ext3 partitions...

the data partition on my buffalo is formatted ntfs

am I missing something?

ls /sbin/fsck.* | cut -d. -f2

gives ext2, ext3

there is a full disc check in the web interface menu, which I ran very early on but it found nothing
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#20

Post by ed »

Nick

scratch the above nonsense, I told you I was out of date....

mount point for the file server is mnt, and mnt is /dev/hda3, which is ext3...

so trying to unmount I took out slim but can't unmount cos something else is also using this, I presume samba for sharing on the network...if I kill samba should I be able to fsck hda3?
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#21

Post by Mike H »

Are you still seeing 2 copies of each file.

A-ha you can use Windows command.com, can you do a dir /ah in the directory, if it lists, those files are hidden to Windows explorer
 
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#22

Post by ed »

Mike

I firmly believe it's got nothing to do with hidden files but a lot to do with character sets......I'm creeping up on it, and I hinted at this problem earlier.

Whatever linux turns an e accent aigu into win7 doesn't like it..maybe?

looking at your hidden files theory, here is dos and linux view of the same thing:

because I recently re-installed win 7 because of another problem, I'm thinking that this installation does something different with odd character sets. At the moment I can't think of another reason why this should suddenly start happening/me noticing it just recently
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#23

Post by ed »

because I went through and reloaded all the files that were missing yesterday, I'm not sure what the missing files looked like in linux before I loaded dupes.

I will load up a new foreign disc and see what it looks like

watch this space, if you're remotely interested that is....
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#24

Post by Mike H »

Ah, there are certain characters that Windows doesn't like in file names:

\ / ? : * " > < |

As '?' in your linux.jpg - I'm guessing this all kicked off because of the French titles and failure to translate accents as you say.
 
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#25

Post by ed »

ok, that hunch wasn't worth pursuing...

I've just loaded up a new album which was showing the problem:
1. I deleted it from the server
2. I ripped it to the C drive with easy-cd
3. I checked the meta data with media tagger
4. I screen dumped explorer looking at the rip(exhibit A)
5. I copied the rip to the server
6. I screen dumped explorer looking at the server(exhibit B)
7. I listed the native directory in linux using Putty with UTF8 encoding(exhibit c)

no problems
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#26

Post by Mike H »

I think I see what's going on now - the accented characters are in Windows unicode, these are double-bytes. The linux listing shows these as '?', I presume this means linux doesn't know what unicode is. So one byte of the double-byte combination is undisplayable (a control character < 32 ?), the other doesn't match the ASCII table (> 128 ?).

All you need is some program to move or copy the file, not be able to interpret the unicode properly while doing so, so it is saved as some character value which then Windows can't read. Then you've got 2 copies of it, of which Windows can see only one. Just guessing.

You could rename all the accented files to simply remove the accents. (?)
 
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#27

Post by ed »

Mike H wrote:I think I see what's going on now -
are you sure?

the way i look at it....linux is storing these files and their filenames.....when windows/explorer asks for these filenames over the network and displays them in explorer they show as the correct characters......so linux is storing them correctly....see exhibit B

it's just that the telnet interface(putty) is showing '?'

My RANDOM missing files that don't show up on explorer but do show up on linux and slimserver and squeezebox (all showing correct characters) is far far far more complicated than hidden files or access privs etc

anyways I give up..the files are not in danger and I have a backup...I just need a new server
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#28

Post by Nick »

What LANG is your telnet client using. It may be that its in a non unicode mode, so its having to replace the unicode characters with the default replacement character which is a ?
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#29

Post by ed »

not sure what you mean by LANG.....there is no setting of that name in Putty and I looked at the configure of the native win7 telnet process but it's very minimalist.

in the putty translation menu it allows selection of remote character set, which is currently set to UTF-8

I have tried it with various settings, including:
win1252(western)
'use font encoding'

no difference

and in appearance it allows selection of a font..it's currently set at courier 10pt

can't find LANG anywhere.........unless you mean what language was chosen when the installer ran??
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#30

Post by Nick »

echo $LANG
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