I am now running mt-daapd on a headless Debian box as a iTunes server. I just thought it’d be great to have a web interface that controls the box to play those mp3 files on the local machine and output the audio to the nearby TV. I am not sure if there is something similar already there. But if not, it’d be fun to fix something like this up. What is needed is to analyze the database of mt-daapd to get the list of audio files and a backend for playing the audio files. The backend probbaly can make use of gstreamer. I should check it out.

Update:

I dug a bit on freshmeat and came up with something (look what open source has brought us!). One that looks exactly like what I am hunting for is called MPD . Time to check it out. There is also this article I should go through. This is all getting interesting.

I had to reinstall Yinan’s Windows box since we believe it was infected by viruses. She got a lot of bookmarks she doesn’t want to lose over a reinstallation. The best way is to have it point to a position out of the user profile by changing the registry:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\User Shell Folders]
"Favorites"="D:\\Favorites"

Played it on NetBSD and FreeBSD, not totally satisfied. There is a daapd and a mt-daapd, the latter of which seems to be a multi-threaded version and more active in development. It has not made its way into NetBSD 2.02 pkgsrc yet and I don’t want to compile from source (since I don’t want to install a compiler). I then tried FreeBSD 5.4 and its mt-daapd is too out-dated so that it does not work with iTunes 5.

I guess the developer is working with Debian sarge, so I will give it a try. Time to download netinstall CD again Seems that this is something that needs to be updated very often due to the changes to iTunes, It’s a safe bet to install whatever the developer is working on.

I bumped into this project when browsing NetBSD pkgsrc. It’s a GTK program that can find iTunes shares and play the music. Looks like exactly what I am looking for on Linux! Will check it out.

I came across a project called daapd which can be used for sharing audio files with iTunes. iTunes will see it as shared music on the LAN. Tried it on my ubuntu box and seems to work fine. Sounds attempting to set up a music and file server now. I can then access all my music on the home machine from everywhere. iTunes no longer connects to a DAAP server outside a subnet. But this can be solved by a program called RendevouzProxy. I think an SSH tunnel plus mDNS will do as well.

Now the problem comes which OS to run. I am hesitating between Debian Linux and NetBSD. NetBSD would be clean and stable. But I am more familiar with Linux.

I know there are some programs there that can do the job. But the ones I found either need perl or don’t work on BSD. I decided to write a small C program myself for the job. Tested on OpenBSD 3.7 and OS X 10.4. I don’t see any reason why it shouldn’t work on other flavors of BSD or Linux. Quick and ugly:
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I am finally done with this home router project and ready to replace my current router running FreeBSD on a PC (described here ). As of Oct 15, it has been up:

 2:21AM  up 447 days,  4:37, 3 users, load averages: 1.02, 1.02, 1.00

The new project aims on similar functionality except the wireless access point. I got a Netgear 802.11g wireless router and use it as an AP. Now it’s time to wrap up everything and give a detailed account of the project.
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The OpenBSD box is running as a router and a firewall for the internal network. The main objective is to let the internal computers access the Internet freely and protect them from the Internet. Only necessary traffic is allowed in. Here are all the rules. Note that ftp clients behind the firewall do not work in active mode. We need ftp-proxy running on the firewall to enable active mode. I have no intention for now, since most ftp servers support passive mode nowadays anyway.
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These files need to be copied:
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1. Get flashdist and install it on a CF.
2. Make changes to rc script for the LAN interfaces.
3. Make changes to rc and start dhcp server
4. Enable ntp daemon.
5. Install name server.
6. Install inadyn and start it in rc.
7. Install postfix.
8. Install pine with maildir patch.
9. Install courier-imap server. Make necessary changes to taylor it down since we don’t need SSL support.