Music please! – forked-daapd issues / solution

I usually do most of my work these days on an Air. While its decent, it is rather dinky spacewise, and I tend to keep it empty of music so I have (barely) enough space for my dev stuff, and various embedded cross compile environments.

I still like listening to music though, so I keep that on secondary and even tertiary storage. This typically is one of the fine HP N36L / N40L NAS devices that I’m fond of buying. I have a few HP N36/N40L nas boxen in various places, some of which contain my music, but most of which contain backups, onsite, and offsite, as you can never be too careful!

I know this quite intimately, as the very machine I’m typing this on had a catastrophic SSD failure only a week ago.
Luckily I didn’t lose too much work!

Enough with the background, and back to the plot.

As I was saying, I needed some tunes to harass the staff with listen to at work.

I looked at a couple of solutions, and decided on forked-daapd, as that allegedly could share music to iTunes from the NAS music folder without too many headaches.

Most instructions were of the sort:

apt-get install forked-daapd

/etc/init.d/forked-daapd restart

In my case it didn’t work.
It also didn’t really give much clue that it wasn’t working, and their website didn’t have much to go on.
I looked at compiling from scratch, but the guy making it uses Clang and Java stuff to build, and it just looked like too much hassle.

So, I had to troubleshoot even though I didn’t really want to spend the time.

My initial issue was something like the below:

forked-daapd wouldn’t run successfully (but it also didn’t complain, sigh). I could see that it wasn’t running on any port specified, and checking kern.log showed it was crapping out silently.

Mar 20 21:03:09 officenas kernel: [ 3392.026612] forked-daapd[9848] trap invalid opcode ip:7f8d8772958e sp:7f8d8176bf60 error:0 in libdispatch.so.0.0.0[7f8d87722000+c000]

Running it in the foreground showed it was having issues creating the mDNS bits.

mdns: Failed to create service browser: Bad state

This eventually worked out to editing /etc/nsswitch.conf, adding the following to the host lines:

hosts: files mdns4_minimal dns mdns4

then restarting avahi

/etc/init.d/avahi-daemon restart

This got me past the bad state error, but then it was bombing out with a missing symbol avl_alloc_tree error.

I did an strace on the thing and found it was looking for libav under /lib vs under /var/lib

This was also documented here – http://blog.openmediavault.org/?p=552&cpage=1#comment-8376, although sadly not until I found out myself.

Looks like the zfsonlinux is the culprit here, as that puts libav files in that folder. Tsk tsk.

I removed those libav files – rm /lib/libav* ****as I know what I’m doing**** (don’t randomly erase stuff unless you’re 3000% sure!), and sure enough, forked-daapd started up, and started blatting tons of output to the logs in a happy manner.
iTunes was also finally happy, and could see my music. Yay.

Took me about 2 hours to figure out sadly, but at least I sorted it out.

Hopefully this will save someone else the headache when they google for the error(s)!