For the past few days I’ve been working on setting up a minimalistic music server for home. As I am always doing some crazy things to my desktop/laptop that eventually leads me to re-install my operating system, I find myself constantly moving music files between computers and external media. When you have a decent sized music library, this excercise starts to become a major pain. That’s how I came up with the idea of creating a media server using mt-daapd as my tool of choice. mt-daapd is so easy to use that I wasted no time and got started right away.

The first step was to register a new product (think project) in rBuilder Online. After spending less than 2 minutes thinking up a name I decided to call it Bailout, as I needed something to bail me out of my music sharing issues (though I’d like some of the bailout money that our goverment is giving out these days).

The next step was to pick and choose what bits I wanted to add to my appliance. since rBuilder allows you to start with Just Enough Operating System (or JEOS for short) components, I proceeded to defining the configuration of my product, choosing the rPath Linux 2 operating system (other choices were Ubuntu Hardy and CentOS) and cherry picked some other components I wanted to make available out of the box. They were smb, nfs and openssh for some choices of connectivity, as well as vim (hey, if I want to ssh into the box and do some manual tweaks I got to have my favorite text editor). This is all done via the web interface in rBuilder and up until now I basically clicked my way through.

Now it was time to add the main attraction of the show: mt-daapd. This component was not available to me from the default software repository and it was time for me to make some important decisions. rBuilder allows you to package software via the web interface using RPMs, DEBs or binary tarballs but I opted for trying out a brand new building tool called rbuild (not to confuse with rBuilder) for those who like to tinker with the command line and already know a bit about the conary package management system. I will not go into details on how I packaged mt-daapd using rbuild but I highly recommend the blog posts written by Michael Johnson for more details about this powerful tool.

Fast forward a few more minutes and my appliance was all ready to go. A few more clicks and I kicked off the build of an installable ISO and a VMWare image for this first “batch”. I could have chosen other formats of delivering my appliance, such as Amazon EC2, Citrix, or Xen but I still have time to go back and edit my product definitions later.

Once my 2 images were available, it was time to smoke test it. I chose to burn a CD using the installable ISO image and used it to install the Bailout appliance to an older computer I have under my desk. The installer is anaconda-based and it is pretty trivial to follow. After the (very quick) installation process and a quick reboot I was face to face with a blank terminal console and instructions to log on to the appliance’s management system by pointing a browser to a local IP address. and so I did.

If you decide to play with the Bailout appliance you’ll see in the download section some instructions about the default credentials for the web based management system, but for those who may have skipped reading the text I put together, you should login using admin as your user and password as your… err, password. Don’t worry, you’ll change this in the very next step.

The first time you login to the appliance, you’ll be prompted to set a new password for the web management user’s account. Make sure you choose something secure as this user is reponsible for the management and maintenance of your appliance.

The next (optional) step is to set up how you’d like to be notified about your appliance’s activities as well as about future updates. As I want to be informed of updates for this appliance, I entered the information necessary and proceeded with the wizard (hint: if you want to skip this step, just click on the save button).

Finally, pick a secure password for the root account of your appliance. Needless to say, this is a very important step in the setup of any GNU/Linux system.

And that is it! Welcome to your your brand new appliance! The web based management system has several options that will allow you to perform many tasks on your appliance, such as updates, backups…

… manage services, configure the network…

… check the overall status and restore your system to a previous stage.

Now you can point your browser to the same address of your web management system, changing the port to 3689 and using admin/mt-daapd as credentials to log in to the web management page for mt-daap. You should also be able to see a new music share show up in your media player of choice (assuming that the Bailout appliance and the system where the media player is running are in the same network).

Right now the appliance is configured to use /mnt/mp3 as its media folder and is not configured to scan it automatically, but this and other settings can be changed by connecting to the appliance (ssh) and manually tweaking the /etc/mt-daapd.conf file. Since the web management system has a rich documented API and allows for the creation of custom plugins, I will most likely create a plugin that will allow you to do this from the web in the days to come. I also want to play with ushare and uPnp to share more than just music files and also allow for sharing with other devices such as a XBox or a Nokia N810 tablet, but only time will tell when I’ll get to it. Obviously, if you want to lend a helping hand, just get in touch with me.

So go out and download a copy of the Bailout appliance today! So far is has proven to be very useful to me!