Ians Ramblings

Had some strange issues with my Western Digital mybook live lately, load going up like crazy all down to Twonky media server, often it will sit at 95% cpu usage.

Incase anyone else is having the same issue just thought I would run through how I got it sorted. Firstly you need to enable SSH access I think I mentioned it earlier on this blog, if you search it, or if not Google that part.

I then disabled Twonky, by running: -

/etc/init.d/twonky stop

Then moved the twonky startup script out of init.d and into root’s home, so it would no longer start on reboot.

Then I installed a more efficient but to be fair less attractive looking media server called mediatomb, using the following command: -

apt-get update && apt-get install mediatomb

Once it’s installed you need to tweak it’s config particularly if you have a PS3 you want to stream to. In this section of the config I changed the ui to be on, enabled an account and changed the port (had to add the port).

 <server>
    <ui enabled="yes" show-tooltips="yes">
      <accounts enabled="yes" session-timeout="30">
        <account user="userblah" password="passblah"/>
      </accounts>
    </ui>
    <port>50000</port>

The next important thing to change is the following, add caching=”no” to the storage element: -

 <storage caching="no">
      <sqlite3 enabled="yes">
        <database-file>mediatomb.db</database-file>
      </sqlite3>
      <mysql enabled="no">
        <host>localhost</host>
        <username>mediatomb</username>
        <database>mediatomb</database>
      </mysql>
    </storage>

I then searched through the file for all mention of PS3 and uncommented the lines that needed to be uncommented such as:

<protocolInfo extend="yes"/><!-- For PS3 support change to "yes" -->

And

<!-- Uncomment the line below for PS3 divx support -->
<map from="avi" to="video/divx"/>

Once you have done all that then you need to restart mediatomb as it will have started after you installed it. Do that by running the following: -

/etc/init.d/mediatomb restart

Now you can encourage mediatomb to pick up your data and start indexing it all. Open a browser and point it at the IP of your WD mybook live box, and use a :50000 if that is the port you are running mediatomb on, you will get an interface like this, once logged in using the username and password from the config.xml earlier: -

Mediatomb

The difference will be that you will have just one directory in the database part. So move to the file system and locate your media directory. On the right of the screen is a + icon with a arrow around it, click that to add the directory to be watched. If unsure set it to periodic checking, full initial scan and set the time to say 60 seconds.

In around 60 seconds it will kick in and start indexing all your files, once it’s complete you should be up and running and you should see all your content in that database view.

I bought a 2TB network storage device the other day a WD MyBook Live but wondered if I could get my old website back up and running on it as well as using it for a media store and for streaming to my PS3. While I was there I got the FTP service working properly so I could access it externally through my router.

These are the steps I took to get MySQL and WordPress installed and running incase it helps anyone else looking to do the same.

Download the config file from your MyBook live under
Settings then Utilities.
Edit the file and set ssh enabled to yes
Re-upload the config using the utilities page again, the box will then reboot
SSH into the box using putty for example

root welc0me

once logged in type

passwd

and press enter
enter new root password
Any changes you want to make to the FTP server can be made in /etc/vsftpd.conf
By the way default passive port range is 5000-5099 which you can tweak.
Update the following to Sources.list in /etc/apt/sources.list
change

deb ftp://ftp.us.debian.org/debian main

to

deb ftp://ftp.us.debian.org/debian main contrib non-free

Run

apt-get update
apt-get install mysql-server
apt-get install wget

Run

wget http://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz
tar xvfz latest.tar.gz
mv wordpress /var/www/yourownname

Then just go to http://nasboxip/yourownname/ in your browser to begin the configuration of wordpress
Once complete you will want to add a virtual host to your Apache config in /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/

I also then changed the existing Apache config file to only allow access from the LAN that way, as it is the default domain it will stop any external web access to the password protected admin interface just in-case there is a weakness in their authentication code.