I recently moved all of our household music to a shared network drive and was looking for a solution to stream these libraries as distinct entities; I wanted to keep my wife’s library separate mostly so I could keep all of my painstakingly catalouged music organized exactly how I like it. I was already using mt-daapd, now known as the Firefly Media Server, to stream my own library from my Linux server. Unfortunately, it doesn’t support streaming two libraries from one program instance. The solution to this is to run two copies of mt-daapd and configure them to play nice with each other. Don’t worry, it’s not quite as difficult as it sounds. The first thing you’ll need is to have a separate configuration file for the second daap instance. The easiest way to do this is to copy the files from an existing installation. ...

I recently started using Xubuntu to see if the proclaimed speed differences actually made a difference in productivity. Unfortunately, the Thunar file manager does not automatically recognize network drives so I needed to manually mount SAMBA shares from the command line. In my searches I stumbled across this thread giving the exact solution I used. Hopefully this helps someone else who is having this same problem. ...

I recently set up a RAID array wanted to keep notified of any errors that may occur. By default Ubuntu Server sends mail to the root user whenever an error occurs but logging in as root to check mail every so often didn’t seem very convenient. There had to be a better way. The best information that I found came from the Ubuntu community forums. Here I’ll expand on that discussion, hopefully helping other people who are trying to do the same thing. The traditional way to forward mail is to create a .forward file in your home directory, entering the addresses that you would like to forward mail to. ...

I’ve been searching for a way to reliably monitor a RAID array. I found a few resources and decided to compile them in one post. If you are running Ubuntu Server skip to the bottom for some good news. ...