Installing Shoutcast DNAS on a Raspberry Pi

Well this was surprisingly painful (mostly because of my complete ineptness with Linux) and I made numerous "schoolboy errors" but because I've now had to do this twice and the second time seemed more painful that the first I'll write it down.

That way if I need to do it a third time perhaps it will be easier.

I already have Icecast running on the Raspberry Pi and that complicated matters slightly as that uses port 8000 by default.

That was a simple install as it is "available" in the repository for the Raspberry Pi.

I found most Shoutcast help focused on Windows or other forms of Linux.

Once I had found a source of DNAS 2.4.7 (In my case where I had previously kept a copy, as the more recent versions seem to require registration to download) and un-archived it to a suitable folder it was a question of what to do next.

To cut a long story short I needed to edit sc_serv_simple.conf

I needed to add PortBase=9000 (to shift the default server port from 8000 where it clashed with Icecast) and edit the stream and admin passwords to two different passwords. This was all done using nano and written out to the same file.

nano sc_serv_simple.conf

Finally run the server

./sc_serv sc_serv_simple.conf

and it worked.

Recovering A Buffalo Linkstation HS-DH750GL

I've a couple of these, one I bought new in 2009 and the second from eBay a couple of years later.

The power went off last night while I was out and when I came home a few things were upset (less than there used to be !) but my two Buffalo NAS units were offline.

I turned them back on, one came back no trouble, the other didn't want to come back online correctly.

I could ping it but no sign of the web interface.

A bit of Googling later I had downloaded Buffalo's NAS Navigator.

This showed one NAS as OK but the other as in "Emergency Mode".

I suspected that for some reason, the power failure had upset the firmware on the broken NAS

Further Googling led me to Buffalo's firmware updater tool.

I downloaded the version appropriate to the HS-DH750GL and it found the broken NAS.

I let it run but at reboot it seemed to fail and said that the update had failed.

I then power cycled the NAS from the front panel and to my relief and surprise it came back good.

Whatever the updater had done seemed to have fixed things.

If you come here with a similar problem I hope that this happens for you !

I'm now running my SyncToy backup to copy this NAS onto a Western Digital "MyCloud" which I bought to back up the two Buffalo units.

The second duff WD Blue disc - now bought a Firecuda

I may have been unlucky but I've just had my second duff WD Blue disc in my ageing desktop.

The desktop is an Acer X3300 and is about seven years old.

The first WD Blue gave me a S.M.A.R.T. failure alarm one day so I wanted a quick replacement disk and bought the same make and model just a bit bigger (1GB vs 650MB).

That installed OK and I used Windows 7 backup and restore to migrate.

Fast forward to about two and a half years and the second WD Blue started being very laggy.

It could sometimes take tens of seconds to seek and the general PC performance was dreadful.

I wondered if it was a driver issue or something broken by one of the Windows 10 updates.

I tried a "refresh" which helped with a laptop but that didn't do much on the desktop.

I decided to bite the bullet and buy another disc.

This time I thought, the Firecuda seems to offer performance improvements and would cost perhaps £20 more. A quick Amazon order and here was a new disc.

Then, how to migrate.

Windows 10 backup and restore wouldn't work (an early indication that all was not well) so I tried the Seagate tool. That didn't like the hard disc USB caddy and had some unfathomable sector size problem, so I replaced the DVD drive with the new Firecuda and set the copy to work. There were complaints about unreadable source sectors but they could be set to be ignored (on the basis that the old system worked) and the copy completed.

Perhaps not ideal but massively less work that another re-installation (although I knew how to do that as I had done the refresh a few weeks ago).

I did a chkdsk /r on the new disc to see if anything duff had been copied and when I looked at the machine next morning all seemed well.

This far (a few days in) I'm very impressed with the Firecuda. It was 1GB 7200 RPM 3.5 inch format and has transformed the machine from frustrating to a pleasure to use.

As a simple upgrade on an aging machine that didn't justify a large SSD it seems good.

Sadly the WD warranty on my disc is two years.

I suppose it was OK for the £40 I paid for it and I've not lost data but I won't rush to buy another WD Blue.