FC3 iTunes Server

The following are notes on my experience of installing Fedora Core 3 and configuring a machine to act as a file server and share music to iTunes on a network. I am assuming basic knowledge of operating at the command line and using a text editing tool. It will help to be familiar with the Gnome desktop.

I am doing this on two old PCs (a PII & a PIII) with FC3 installed on new 160Gb hard drives. Besides this the machines needed little modification, although running Gnome does seem to require upwards of 256Mb… The PII required an IDE card since the BIOS couldn’t cope with drives larger than 32Gb.

Having installed FC3, log in as root user and configure the machines for the network (I find this easy to do in Gnome: go to System Tools > Network). I have used static IP addresses, this keeps things simple. Enter your router as the primary DNS server. Name the machine machine.local. Make sure your ethernet card is activated. Reboot if necessary.

Configure NFS:

Create a folder to be shared at /path/shared. Use chmod to change the permissions to allow all users access. Edit /etc/exports and add the line

/path/shared *(rw,sync,insecure,all_squash,anonuid=500,anongid=500)

The asterisk makes the share available to all computers on the network. You can restrict it to a particular machine by specifying an IP address instead. You can make it read only access by putting “ro” instead of “rw”.

Start NFS with service nfs start. Check whether nfsd is running with service –status-all.

You can configure the NFS deamon to run at startup with chkconfig nfs on (? I think?). The check if chkconfig –list nfs gives:

nfs 0:off 1:off 2:on 3:on 4:on 5:on 6:off

These correspond to the Linux run levels:

0 – halt

1 – Single user mode

2 – Multiuser, without NFS (The same as 3, if you don’t have networking)

3 – Full multiuser mode

4 – unused

5 – X11

6 – Reboot

Configure Rendezvous (aka Bonjour aka ZeroConf):

Configure /etc/howl/mDNSResponser.conf by adding the line

“This Share” _nfs._tcp local. 2049 “path=/path/shared”

mDNSResponder should run at startup by default. Restart the computer or mDNSResponder with service mDNSResponder restart.

Installing Software

Replace /etc/yum.conf with the file from here. You may need to import keys.

It is advised not to mix repositories, however, I do not know how you tell which ones are compatible or which ones are not, and opinion seems to be divided on how deadly thisis… So I don’t recommend you do this, but I have added http://atrpms.net/dist/fc3/ with the lines:

[at-stable]

name=ATrpms for Fedora Core $releasever stable

baseurl=http://apt.atrpms.net/fedora/$releasever/en/$basearch/at-stable

at the end of yum.conf. I have found it useful for media players etc… I’ve also added the following:

[silfreednet]

name=Silfreed.net Packages

baseurl=http://www.silfreed.net/download/repo/fedora/$releasever/$basearch/silfreednet

This allows us to install mt-daapd with yum install mt-daapd. The alternative is to:

Install mt-daapd

Go to Sourceforge and download mt-daapd-0.2.1.1-1.fc3.i386.rpm. Run this from your downloads folder. If you are advised of dependecies, try to find rpms and install them in a similar way. A good place to look is rpm.pbone.net.

Mt-daapd is a neat little package that can be configured to take music in a directory on your FC3 machine and advertise it via Rendezvous to iTunes machines on the network. Mt is “multithread”, daap is iTunes’ digital audio access protocol. Mt-daapd includes a webserver for its web based interface and mDNSResponder, so you only need to configure the programme itself.

More to follow soon…

Connect to your server outside your subnet

Use SSH Tunnelling & Rendezvous Beacon, as described at here. Use the -g option to allow other machines on the subnet you’re connecting from to use your tunnel.

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