Serviio

Hey there,

the website states that serviio requires at least 378MB of RAM. Since I'd like to run serviio with Debian on a Seagate BlackArmor NAS that has only 128MB available (and no upgrade possibilities), I'm running tests to see if serviio is able to run with only 128MB.

My test environment:
- VirtualBox machine, 1 CPU, 128MB RAM, 12MB Video RAM
- Debian 6.0 Squeeze amd64 (fresh installation)
- sun-java6-jre debian package
- ffmpeg debian package

serviio starts up fine. Even starting X (with xfce4) and launching serviio console for testing purposes works (although X and the console are responding notably slow and sluggish - the console seems to have the main impact there). I then feeded it a folder containing 10 movies or so (50 GB-ish) and it indexes it without any visible problems. All of that makes me confident that 128MB is ok since I'm only intending to run the server, without X and without the console.

BlackArmor NAS hardware:
- Marvell Feroceon, 800 MHz, ARM926EJ-S, Sheeva CPU Core Technology
- Marvell 88F6192 A0 LE Board, Kirkwood (the successor of Orion) SoC series

Watching a 1080p .mkv takes up ~5-10% CPU on the VirtualBox (~1-2% when not playing anything and only serviio and top running). Host CPU is an AMD Phenom II X4 940 3.00GHz so the NAS is probably fine CPU-wise (just a rough estimation though).

What do you think? Should I give it a try on the NAS? Would it die on larger media folders?
Did any of you guys test with similar conditions? What are your experiences?

Depending on how things go, installing some webserver with PHP and AcidumIrae's Web UI could also be possible.

thanks in advance for your opinions

Moved here.

The memory is only needed when you have large images (e.g. 15MPix) in the library, otherwise you might be ok with the 128MB

Oh, thanks. Didn't know there is a dedicated forum for NAS installations.

There are no images at all, only videos (~2TB). I wonder if serviio can handle that with 128MB. :)

Also, are there specific features that hog on memory when enabled? Like, e.g., thumbnail generation and what not.

Serviio is up and running on the device by now. I had to take a little different course though, since sun-java6-jre is not fully available under armel.

- Debian 5.0 Lenny armel (as seen here)
- openjdk-6-jre-headless debian package
- ffmpeg debian package

Serviio takes up ~30% (~38MB) memory without any files added (yet).

After some testing and actual usage, I have to say: it performs really good. I have been running serviio instances on my netbook (winxp) and pc (win7). Both have way more CPU and RAM at their disposal than the BlackArmor NAS.
Surprisingly enough, it performs faster than both of them (playback starts faster, skipping is faster) and even supports resuming playback at the last position that Samsung C-Series offers while that doesn't work on the windows instances.

Lovely. :)

TIF PLEASE HELP!!! AND THANK YOU SO FAR FOR THE GUIDEANCE!!!!!

Please help!!! Had a Netgear Stora..returned bc I felt as though it was complete garbage and netgear cs is HORRIBLE. Now have a seagate blackarmor NAS 220. Really like device but the DLNA straming is horrible and SERVIIO is HANDS DOWN THE BEST DLNA STREAMING SOFTWARE OUT THERE (Ive tried every win version i could get my hands on) Followed tif and zip's blackarmor forum seen here http://forum.serviio.org/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=1945 and esp direction for installing debian from norenberg directions here http://www.noerenberg.de/hajo/pub/seagate-blackarmor-nas.txt.

Now... I am a complete linux newb. Been around in the win world for a long time and know my way in or out of most situations. I am quite confused by this process but am fairly certain I am on the right track.

I have (per norenberg instructions) gained root access (using putty) and been able to change password. DL customized debian files (2) and done manual firmware upgrade. Again am able to gain root access, cannot remember here but do not think it reset pw to root, it appeared to remain the same as 1st fw upgrade (per instructions) to gain original root access from tutoril atsahs (i of course as stated previously was able to maunually change that) Also did not change ip address of NAS after (what i thnk was a successful) debian install. Now this is where I begin to get a little lost. Im so used to a GUI to work in and am unfamiliar with linux cmds up until about 24 hrs ago when I have been cramming my brain with every tutorial out there.

Nothing tells me debian is there

in putty I appear to be working with busy box (BusyBox v1.1.1 (2011.01.11-10:26+0000) multi-call binary) when i type busy box into putty.

Per instructions:
After applying the SP, the system starts with a Debian Lenny minimal
system (basic system binaries and SSH daemon only). However, you are
free to install additional packages via the Debian package management
system. For configuration, you'll have to use your favourite text
editor.

debian package manager? is it already there? how to i get it or use it?
text editor..what is it need for? am i using it on windows side or from putty/winscp?

as stated before I can gain root access with my chosen pw
It works in putty
in winscp i can access via SCP but not SFTP is this a problem?

Finally i was able to (from busy box) use wget command to acquire the files I think i need per Tifs blackarmor post

I have: openjdk-6-jre-headless_6b18-1.8.7-2~lenny1_amd64.deb
ffmpeg_0.svn20080206-18+lenny3_amd64.deb
serviio-0.5.2-linux.tar.gz

all 3 files reside in the /root/tmp directory

Anything I try to do they will not install... I am definately doing something minorly wrong or I am way in over my head and am missing huge steps here...

When trying to install I was getting (tryinig this in putty and cmd from winscp)

I get in return : var/lib/dpkg/status does not exist

So i manually created path in winscp then run

/tmp $ dpkg -i openjdk-6-jre-headless_6b18-1.8.7-2~lenny1_amd64.deb

dpkg: Package openjdk-6-jre-headless depends on openjdk-6-jre-lib, which is not installed or flagged to be installed

then try

/tmp $ dpkg -i -F openjdk-6-jre-headless_6b18-1.8.7-2~lenny1_amd64.deb

segmentation fault

Please help, I know as a linux newb this long post and I are looked at as a pain in the a$$ but in all my windows yrs ive always been a contributor to these types of forums and will troubleshoot for weeks on end to solve. This animal that is linux has my head spinning. Any help would be greatly appreciated as this NAS is useless to me as is being that (yes as a storage/backup device it is sufficient BUT all of my media to stream throughout my home is useless resising on there)

Hey David,

first off, you don't need to gain root access to your BA before installing debian. That's completely optional and only required if you want to ssh into seagates linux installation.

When logging in (via putty) to your BA, debian should greet you with something like this:

It will also automatically present you with an interactive shell called bash (no busy-box there) that will look something like this (depending on the hostname of your device, mine is "blackarmor"):

To make sure you have debian, you can type these two commands:


If neither of those are there, your debian fw upgrade didn't work. You should then carefully retry the upgrade process step-by-step. One thing to pay special attention to is that the "firmware image" (custom-sg2000-2000.1337.sp99.img) has to be renamed to sg2000-2000.1337.sp99.img before applying it.

Your BA will definately have the password set to "root" after you installed debian. It's not debian if your old password still works. Of course, once you have debian up and running, you can change the password again.

So, if you managed to get debian up, you can start to profit from it's package management.

The core of debians package management is dpkg. With that alone, you are basically able to manually install debian packages (.deb files).

Front-ends to dpkg are apt-get and aptitude (newer). Both can be used to automatically fetch/install/upgrade packages from debian repositories, also taking care of dependencies, conflicts etc. I'm not really sure which one is suggested over the other, but I mainly use aptitude. They have very similar command syntax and work on the same repositories and packages, so they are mostly interchangeable. To tell if they are there, do this:


Installing the serviio prerequisites (ffmpeg and openjdk-6-jre-headless) is really easy. First, you fetch the latest version informations from the debian repository, then you issue the install command:

It will ask you to confirm installation of those two packages as well as all of their dependencies. Once you confirmed, it will do all the work for you. No need to download any .deb files manually. :)

Debian ships (among others) the text editor nano which should get you going for simple editing tasks. I prefer vim which is quite powerful, but also way harder to get into when you're a windows victim. :)
Anyways, you simply type nano /path/to/file/you/want/to/edit and when you're done editing, you press ctrl+x. If you changed the file, it will ask you to save or dismiss your changes.

Getting serviio up basically just requires downloading, unpacking and launching it. You don't even need WinSCP, you can download it directly to your BA using wget. With the following commands, you create a directory "install" within your home directory, download/unpack serviio into it and finally launch serviio directly on your console.


However, this way, serviio blocks your console (you cannot type commands as long as serviio runs - which is forever, unless you press ctrl+c to terminate serviio). Also, as soon as you disconnect/close your putty, serviio will be terminated as well.

To further incorporate serviio into your debian installation, you probably want to move serviio to a more appropriate location, like "/usr/local/serviio" or so. You also want to use an init-script. That way, setting your BA up to automatically launch serviio on boot is also trivial. But I'll leave that as your homework. :)

Good luck!

Tif-

Thank you so so much for the detailed reply. I think I definately botched the firmware upgrade form the start. Def no debian present and pw def did not change. Waiting for my lady to wake up so I can connect in from work and try to get this thing up and running!!! After deb is installed, along with packages the online access to the device management software will still be present correct? THank you so very much for the detailed instructions again. I will definately report back with my results!!! My seagate nas purchase was for data redundancy and backups (we have almost 2 yr old son and almost lost ALL pics recently gotta love data recovery) and also to be able to interface with dlna devices without use of a PC. serviio on a nas is my answer. Fingers crossed. Thanks again TIf.
DavidG

No, the web interface is specific to seagates firmware/installation and will be gone once you installed debian. However, you may want to have a look at webmin (or similar) if you prefer going with a web interface.

AHHHH not happy..... First thing I did when I hooked this thing up out of the box was UPDATE THE FIRMWARE. 2000-1211. I just realized (I KNOW NOOB!!!!!!) in instructions my f/w revision has not been tested. Welp back to store it goes. Not very happy right now. Few days I will have the new one Im sure. Will report back then.... hopefully some useful info Ive helped in future revisions/upgrades. Ovbviously this process will not allow install of debian on .1211 f/w. ssh access does work with sp42.img and pw does work and can be changed (this is where i encounter busy-box) I can only assume this is the default sg blckarmor linux kernel. Anyone know of way of rolling back fw? As far as I can tell from seagate foreums etc. this process is not possible....

When inserting blank disks (or blanking the current disks), the default firmware will be installed. Blanking disks of course implies that all data on it is practically gone. ;)

I understand. I had hoped that debian was running in the background sort of silently from the system where serviio of course too would run. i assumed that the console administration (shares/raid/networking) would still all take place via seagates web gui.

Hm why do you think installing the debian "firmware" is not possible after updating the seagate firmware first? AFAIR, I updated to the latest seagate firmware before installing debian and it worked for me.

Since the seagate firmware is almost completely replaced (only the kernel and a few files/tools are kept), it shouldn't matter what version of the seagate firmware was present before.

Hi,

Ever so slightly hijacking this post

I have a DLINK DNS-320 NAS with similar hardware as your Seagate NAS which is:

800 MHz Marvell 88F6281 (Kirkwood) CPU
128mb RAM

From you notes I see you got Serviio running which bodes well for me as this nAS can also run Debian. However the main reason of interest is that I want to use it with my new Sony Bravia EX503 series TV which does not play mkv or divx natively (which my whole video collection is based upon).

So I guess this is a really stupid question - will my NAS have the power to transcode these files on the fly for the Sony TV to play?
I just need to know if this is a non-runner before I play about heavily with my NAS.

Regards,
DaScoobmaster

You could probably do some testing with a throttled virtual machine or an old PC before you start messing with the NAS. I have a Athlon K7 750 MHz at hands if you're interested. :D
My LE37C650 plays mkv natively so there is no transcoding involved for me.

Good luck!

The Sony profile mostly remuxes (low CPU load), it only transcodes few file formats. So it also depends what kind of file you have in your library and whether they are SD/HD.

Gents,

Thanks very much for the quick feedback.

I have VMware workstation so i will try a throttled debian VM and see how that works before playing with the NAS.

The remuxing news is fairly good. Most of the HD stuff will be on my other tV which has a dedicated media player. However this is a second TV which will be used for mostly SD XVID kids films. So I will give it a blast.

What success I do have I will post up here to help others.

Cheers...

I have been running into trouble lately.

Initial connection from my Samsung LE37C650 to serviio on the NAS and descending into the first folder works fine.

When I try to list a larger folder (~50 items, ~450GB) though, it displays an error after a few seconds, saying the request failed. Maybe some sort of timeout, I don't know. When I retry a few times, it works eventually.

Nothing in serviio.log.

Is there something I can do about that?

EDIT:
just for reference, this looks related:
viewtopic.php?f=5&t=2277

I have seen this before, looks like the TV doesn't wait long enough and works later because it's already cached. You'll get that working by removing <DeviceDescription> block in the C/D profile in profiles.xml. You'll lose the Samsung integration though.

hello,
I am sorry for my English. Ask me how everything back to its original state without Debian. It can be done so that I did not come about files on the NAS?