I’ll admit it, I’m a geek. When geeks save $$$ for awhile, we get toys with 12Tb of raw disk space. Now this purchase wasn’t taken lightly. I did some research and chose the ReadyNas Pro 6 disk for a few reasons.
- It runs Debian 4.0 (Etch) x86_64. In the past, I’ve used Ubuntu as a ‘nix workstation and am quite familar with Debianisms.
- It has an Intel Atom dual core processor instead of some of the lower end Mips or ARM processor. It is easier to get software to work on it as a standard x86 Linux install.
- Netgear not only allows, but actively encourages modding and tinkering with it. The ReadyNAS Forums are pretty top notch and “Yohdah“, their support guru, is very helpful.
- It has some pretty decent plugins and community plugins that make a lot of things you’d want to hack on dead simple. It is only a few clicks to install the root ssh plugin, yay!
After finding the Subsonic plugin, and the fantastic Subsonic web media server, I installed the plugin. It defaults to listening on port 4040 so you have to go to http / https://readynas:4040 to listen to your tunes. Knowing it could be better, I started poking around the readynas apache configuration and realized that it had mod_proxy installed.
Aha! I’ll just use my standard Debian apache configuration know how and all will be well. Nope… They put the apache configuration under /etc/frontview/apache and their “conf.d” directory is: /etc/frontview/apache/addons. Under the addons directory there was already a SUBSONIC.conf, but further plugin upgrades would overwrite that. I created /etc/frontview/apache/addons/subsonic_proxy.conf that looks ultimately like this:
readynas:/etc/frontview/apache/addons# cat subsonic_proxy.conf
# Serve Subsonic via apache under /subsonic/
LoadModule proxy_module /usr/lib/apache2/modules/mod_proxy.so
LoadModule proxy_http_module /usr/lib/apache2/modules/mod_proxy_http.so
ProxyRequests Off
ProxyPreserveHost On
<Proxy *>
Order deny,allow
Allow from all
</Proxy>
ProxyPass /subsonic/ http://localhost:4040/subsonic/
ProxyPassReverse /subsonic/ http://localhost:4040/subsonic/
<Location /subsonic>
Allow from all
</Location>
Next up was figuring out the proper way to restart apache. Since they use the non-standard configuration file, the normal apachectl configtest fails:
readynas:/etc/frontview/apache/addons# apache2ctl configtest
apache2: Could not open configuration file /etc/apache2/apache2.conf: No such file or directory
This was easy enough by changing into /etc/apache2 and running: ln -s ../frontview/apache/httpd.conf apache2.conf. Now commands like this work perfectly:
readynas:# apache2ctl configtest && apache2ctl stop && apache2ctl start
To finish up the configuration, edit /c/webroot/subsonic/subsonic.sh and change SUBSONIC_CONTEXT_PATH= to SUBSONIC_CONTEXT_PATH=/subsonic. Now just kill the existing java process and run ./subsonic.sh for it to start everything up.
Then you just browse to http://readynas/subsonic/ (notice the trailing slash) and you're doneski.
