Messages

1

Users / Re: Audio Media file format question

« on: April 05, 2009, 05:47:17 pm »

UpdateMedia

I have to admit I was hoping for a little more guidance than that... But I'll work with it. *laugh*

Since I'm already running 0710, I'm inclined to work on that branch. However, if it's close enough to the 0810 release or if there have been enough changes to UpdateMedia since 0710 to make merging across branches impractical, I'll take a look at trunk instead.

-Sean

2

Users / Re: Audio Media file format question

« on: April 05, 2009, 04:56:34 pm »

Thanks all.
I had not realised that m4a files did not contain any tags (serves me right for buying an apple!). Anyway, I am looking at converting the m4a files to mp3. I know it is slightly lossy, but I can probably recover the tags. I don't fancy re-ripping my cd collection!

Its not so much that they can't contain tags (I believe they can), its more that LinuxMCE's UpdateMedia daemon does not currently import them. It is tilted towards mp3 files...

I have a large number (2,000+) of m4a and flac files that are already perfectly tagged and I'd rather not convert them. And sadly the admin interface is not well suited for correcting metadata on such a large number of files.

If someone could direct me to the appropriate place(s) in the LMCE codebase that handle importing the tags, I'd be willing to a take a look and possibly submit a patch.

Thanks.

-Sean

3

Installation issues / Re: Diskless boot fails: transmit timed out

« on: April 01, 2009, 01:38:07 am »

you really need to try to disable the onboard NIC becfore using a card otherwise it might get confused.

I tend to doubt it got confused... it got an IP address from DHCP using eth1 and definitely recognized that there was no available connection on eth0. But it's still worth trying.

... But when that kernel starts, it has its own NIC drivers which take over from the PXE boot software. When that happens, what I am concerned about is whether it is setting eth1 to DHCP as it would normally expect to set eth0 to DHCP.

I hear what you're saying. Makes sense. Turns out that's not a problem. The real cause: bad network card.

However, I ran into a few more problems due to my own stupidity... which I should probably record for posterity (in case anyone else runs into similar problems).

First off, this computer only supports PXE boot from the on-board NIC, which doesn't work with LMCE. So I recompiled GRUB with support for the RealTek 8319 and created a "boot cd" with a simple grub config, following the instructions at: http://wiki.linuxmce.org/index.php/GRUB_PXE_network_boot

However, to make matters more complicated, I forgot that I had already tried setting up a different MD with that network card - so LMCE had already created an MD (#35) associated with that MAC address. The default target for the kernel and initrd image did not include a reference to the MD object number. Specifically, the lines in my menu.lst for GRUB looked like the following:

Code: [Select]

kernel /tftpboot/default/vmlinuz root=/dev/nfs acpi=off vga=normal ramdisk_size=10240 rw ip=all apicpmtimer
initrd /tftpboot/default/initrd
When I boot that way, it continually times out with the same message:

Code: [Select]

NETDEV WATCHDOG: eth0: transmit timed out
eth0: link up, 100Mbps, full-duplex, lpa 0x45E1
So I manually launched the network boot (I'll update my boot cd later) using the following settings instead (culled from Grub PXE wiki page):

Code: [Select]

kernel /tftpboot/35/vmlinuz ramdisk=10240 rw root=/dev/nfs boot=nfs nfsroot=192.168.80.1:/usr/pluto/diskless/35
initrd /tftpboot/35/initrd.img
And voila. Problem solved. I'm a happy camper and my faith in LMCE has been restored.

Thanks again for your assistance. I really appreciate it.

-Sean

4

Installation issues / Re: Diskless boot fails: transmit timed out

« on: March 31, 2009, 09:54:10 pm »

you really need to try to disable the onboard NIC becfore using a card otherwise it might get confused.

I tend to doubt it got confused... it got an IP address from DHCP using eth1 and definitely recognized that there was no available connection on eth0. But it's still worth trying.

That also reminded me that the RealTek 8139 NIC I'm trying to use is a cheap piece of junk. It's quite possible the NIC is bad... and, as it just so happens, I have another identical 8139 card that I can try instead. So I'll give that a shot as well tonight, in addition to disabling the onboard NIC.

Get one of the Intel NICs that are mentioned in the forums and wiki as working... it will almost certainly be easier.

If disabling the onboard NIC and swapping in a different RealTek 8139 both fail, I'll pick up a new NIC. From the forums, it sounds like the Intel PWLA8391GT gigabit NIC would be a good choice for a PCI NIC and at $24 from NewEgg it's a lot cheaper than building a new machine.

Thanks for the suggestions.

-Sean

5

Installation issues / Diskless boot fails: transmit timed out

« on: March 31, 2009, 05:28:45 am »

So I started with a fresh install of 0710 from DVD, which appears to be working beautifully. Next I tried to PXE boot a second machine to function as an MD - that failed early on due to a problem with the driver for the NVidia ethernet adapter. Since I happened to have an extra RealTek 8139 NIC lying around, I threw that in the machine. I can boot off that, get an IP address from the Core and start the process... unfortunately, it fails part way through:

NETDEV WATCHDOG: eth1: transmit timed out
eth1: link up, 100Mbps, full-duplex, lpa 0x45E1

That repeats for a while then eventually it just gives up and sits there.

I tried reinstalling the Core from scratch, but that didn't help.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks.

-Sean