I want to apologize for occasionally raining on this parade, but I think it's only fair to anyone reading these pages that may be thinking of using a NAS to run Subsonic that they should know what they are up against. Many NAS systems are fine products and although somewhat overpriced are very good products for users who want minimal setup and a great oob experience for network storage - the function that they are designed for.
Although, as seen by this thread, it is possible to accomplish, it is not an easy task and can be a real pain. The whole concept is a contradiction if you actually give it some thought. I know, deep thinking isn't very common these days, but let's give it a try. Who would buy an overpriced NAS rather than just building a far more powerful, flexible and cost effective server for half the price? Obviously someone who doesn't want the hassle of doing the build and the setup. Yet, now that same user wants to get Subsonic running on a NAS that isn't really designed to do that and will consume power that the NAS designers never envisioned for the box.
My suggestion: Spend another $35 for a Rasberry Pi and just have it access the music stored on the overpriced NAS. That way you can screw up the Pi as often as you like without messing up the overpriced NAS.
-OR-
You could so what I just did. I'm running out of server space and always need more storage. So I decided to build a new server that I will use to consolidate and run all my Subsonic sites on. I'm committed to Madsonic for everyday use, but I also like to test other forks and keep a current Subsonic site up for reference. That way I can test new features and experiment with transcodings and things like HTML5, without messing up my primary site.
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?Vi ... 1116953803I just ordered one of these. Dual quad core Xeons running at 2.5GHz with 16GB ram an 4 15k rpm 73GB hard drives for a total of $210 with shipping. Add $50 for WHS 2011 and for $260 TOTAL I'll have a Subsonic server that can run circles around any NAS unit and it has 4 3.5" hard drive bays for storage. I'll probably set up 3 virtual machines on the box so I can run 4 instances of Subsonic on the same box, each with 4gb of ram. The box comes with dual NIC's built in, so I can access media stored on my storage array fast enough that it won't be a factor for play back.
The 4 73GB hard drives were kind of a bonus and I might use them as boot drives on other systems and leave one for boot on this system and add 3 high capacity drives for more storage space. I'll wait till the unit arrives next Friday to figure out which way to go. I doubt that these are set up in RAID, but if they are I may just leave them that way as it would be probably faster than an SSD if these 4 at 15k SAS were in RAID.
And the advantage to buying a NAS is ... ???
Again - I do appreciate the plug and play aspect of a high quality NAS for someone who doesn't want to do their own setup and get into installing and configuring and Operating System, but if that is why you would buy a NAS, why would you want to get into the challenge of installing Subsonic on the box. In my experience, setting up Subsonic can be more of a challenge than installing an OS. But, then again, I've been installing OS's for over 30 years, so maybe I'm not the right benchmark on this issue.
Either way, I've outlined two affordable options that make more sense than hacking the NAS.
I may start working on setting up Subsonic on my Rasberry Pi this week as well. I'm not a Linux guy, but if I get it running I'll try to get a post up.