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In Reply to: RE: When your music appliance breaks you're at the mercy of others... posted by AbeCollins on July 22, 2015 at 11:52:49
This was the number 1 reason why I wanted to drop all computer audio.....sooner or later something breaks.
Bad thing about Linux is tweaking can set you off on a masochistic adventure in which a simple 2 minute fix can turn into days or weeks of pain.
Although I do have true appliances now ie...turn on and works, I still think from time to time to buy a pure music streamer.
Dynobots Audio
Music is the Bridge between Heaven and Earth - 音楽は天国と地球のかけ橋
Follow Ups:
What breaks? There are no moving parts on any of my computer audio components.
Usually nothing breaks until I/someone starts to play around with tweaking etc. In Linux you can update various things like the Kernel, ALSA etc. Depending on your success or failure it may or may not break your "Appliance" music server.
Then there are always issues of stability of the OS and installed software. Starting/Stopping/Re-booting may exacerbate any instabilities and all of a sudden a networked music directory won't mount or your music software won't start etc.
Basically it all boils down to the robustness of the software/operating system and the users ability not to play around so much with code as to break something.
Dynobots Audio
Music is the Bridge between Heaven and Earth - 音楽は天国と地球のかけ橋
Another aspect is the user's particular talent (karma) to tweak just those things most likely to reveal latent bugs. Working for many years in the computer industry, I found this an valuable skill. Among other things, it helped me evaluate the employees as to whether their designs and code actually worked or just appeared to work. (In a large corporation there are always poseurs who move on to another department before their failures can be attributed to them.)
So in general (unless I am having a particularly bad day) I am delighted when I find a new bug or when one of my attempted tweaks fails.
"You seek problems because you need their gifts." - Richard Bach
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
Yes basically tweaking is in effect working out the bugs and making things more robust...provided what was broken can be fixed.Linux is a world of half baked and abandon projects, no doubt coders either get board or run into brick walls that they can not fix and just move on...
Linux as a whole has become more robust, so Linux based music servers are pretty rock solid.
Dynobots Audio
Music is the Bridge between Heaven and Earth - 音楽は天国と地球のかけ橋
Edits: 07/23/15
I had a Linux adventure a few months ago. The 1.5 TB disks on my Thecus NAS were getting old and full, so I took advantage of a sale to buy new 3 GB drives. These were supported by new firmware, so I upgraded that as well. Then I proceeded to upgrade the NAS by swapping drives, one at a time, and have the RAID array rebuild. (Actually, not quite true, first I backed up all the files on the NAS to a spare drive that I keep off-site.) The rebuild took several days, swapping one drive at a time. Finally, when it was done I had the space I would have had if I had purchased 2 TB drives, not the space I thought I'd paid for.
Some Googling showed that the problem was that the drives had originally been formatted with fdisk (because when I got the NAS I was using older firmware). Therefore there was the 2 TB limit. Swapping drives as per the RAID kept all of the new drives formatted the same way. Some more googling showed that an existing drive formatted with fdisk could be "jacked up" and the gdisk formatting dropped in. I took one drive out and put it on another computer running Linux. This worked. Unfortunately, when I dropped the "jacked up" drive back in the RAID didn't like it. (Maybe it would have worked if I had "jacked up" all of the drives before putting them back into the NAS.)
At this point, I admitted defeat and followed the official instructions, which amounted to zapping all five new disks and restoring from my backup.
In this case, the problem was the 2 TB limit, inherited from who knows where? (IBM, Microsoft and Intel?) Incidentally, Thecus sells their NAS products as appliances, not computers. However, they do have the ability to add some software, in this case I added SSH to gain root access to the machine, which was how I figured out what was going wrong, spacewise.
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
The 2 TB limit has to do with 32-bit BIOS, 512-byte sector addressing & Master Boot Record dating back to the 1980's from the original PC/DOS days.
Many modern computers that are not encumbered by legacy compatibility use GUID Partition Table (GPT) initialized drives. But, you need a EFI or UEFI-based computer running a 64-bit OS to boot from a GPT drive.
Yes, that's correct with one possible exception. I don't believe that you necessarily need a 64 bit operating system with Linux to get past the 32 bit barrier. When I reflashed the DOM on my NAS from a new image I presume I got the new bios at that time. This machine has a 32 bit processor, but there's no access to the BIOS without opening up the box and connecting a display, something that I haven't tried. (This is what you have to do to recover from a bricked DOM on this NAS.)
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
Yes, I believe there were some interim work arounds for 32-bit OSs and EUFI but many systems support both EUFI and legacy BIOS.
It gets pretty complicated as I believe you have to consider 32-bit vs 64-bit device drivers as well.
all I know is my system ain't broke..I'm listening to the Simon and Garfunkel remasters (24/192) right now in my main system and the files are on a G-Tech drive two flights up.
i picked up my iPad, selected the album, hit play, and my DAC is sending music to amp which in turn is sending it to my speaker.
and it sounds superb.
Nuthin' broken here.
I leave it other to masturbate their computer audio systems while go deep into my library on a daily basis.
I take it you presumed this post/topic meant that all systems break and/or yours is broken?I don't think anyone was insinuating that your system is broken, so you can enjoy your computer audio system in peace.
I'd be willing to bet this topic is not about you.
FWIW, my system in not broken either, hasn't been for some years now.
Enjoy.
Dynobots Audio
Music is the Bridge between Heaven and Earth - 音楽は天国と地球のかけ橋
Edits: 07/23/15
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