What was preventing my Rios from accessing the Ubuntu system was the fact that I still had the Rio software running on my Windows computer. Killing armgr.exe solved the problem immediately. So now I’m happily listening to some more Christmas music.

Once again, many thanks for you patience and many helpful suggestions. I did install “nfswatch” and it proved what I though; nothing much was happening.

Knowing full well that I’ll have to reinstall everything at some later date and knowing how my memory works, I’ve written up a somewhat more detailed procedure in LibreOffice that I’d be happy to send you. If you want a copy just send me an email.

All the best,
Bob

I still have a problem, though, but I think I’ll be able to resolve it. Only one player is showing on the Music Server. The other, which is hooked in to my Home Theater system booted okay and also went into screen saver mode but, for some reason, isn’t being recognized.

I’m going to try a few things and will report back. I think it’s important that I log as much of my failures and successes in case someone else finds your blog and can garner some insight from my trek through this.

After I get everything running I’ll try to recap my steps and post them here. In spite of the fact your instructions are much better than what Robin shared, they are not detailed enough for someone with out the experience. My experience writing technical documentation is that you can’t assume the reader understands what you’re saying. For example, Robin says “Install and run an SSDP server.” That sentence may have meant something to you but I didn’t know what an SSDP server was nor how to install and run it. As is usually the case, Googling helped.

One thing I’m still not sure of is when I created /tftpboot/RIOADDRESS for each RIO and put them in /etc/exports I didn’t put /tftpboot itself in there. Consequently, I dumped Robin’s file in the first RIOADDRESS directory and then again in the second. Perhaps if I’d just put it in /tftboot it would have worked also. I think I’ll give that a try.

I’ve been wanting to get my music playing from my Ubuntu computer for a long time. While SlimRIO works in Windows and is a whole lot easier to set up, I had a couple of reoccurring problems, the worst of which was occasional pauses in the music playback. This, you can appreciate, can be quite annoying. And it happened with XP and Win 7, which I installed last fall after my hard drive crashed. I suspect the reason for this is Windows’ seemingly constant hammering of the hard drive. That was one difference I noticed from the first time I started using Linux with Ubuntu 8.04 a few years ago. When idle, the OS is hardly ever accessing the HD. At the moment, I’m writing on my Ubuntu box and as I glance at my Win 7 box the HD light is flickering constantly. I would expect that Linux users might experience longer-lasting HDs.

The nss_wins output appears to be some aspect of the samba support I have baked into my server (it hosts samba and nfs among other things).

There is a utility nfswatch that might help – I can’t seem to install it on my server (I’m on a fairly old version of Ubuntu). http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/precise/en/man8/nfswatch.8.html

This is why I used wireshark to track down the issue originally. Learning how that works, and getting it situated on the network where it’ll see the packets is really the best way to solve this.

NFS is probably working fine, what’s probably not working is the path that you’re pointing things at. So either the RIO is looking for the wrong machine (IP) to host the NFS server, or the path that it’s trying to mount is wrong.

re: NFSv4Howto
I’d been looking at this page and was somewhat unsure what I should or should not be concerned about. Do I need to do this;
“In /etc/default/nfs-kernel-server we set:
NEED_SVCGSSD=no # no is default
because we are not activating NFSv4 security this time.”
But if “no” is the default, why bother?

And;
“For the server, you can e.g. raise rpc.svcgssd log level in /etc/default/nfs-kernel-server:”
RPCSVCGSSDOPTS=”-vvv”
I appended that to the end of the file

I restarted nfs and nfs-kernel-server (which appear to do the same thing) and ran ps xuwa | grep rpc.gssd resulting in this output:
bob 3221 0.0 0.0 13124 1032 pts/0 S+ 18:26 0:00 grep –color=auto rpc.gssd
which is nothing like the example in the troubleshooting page.

So I’m still missing something but I don’t know what. I haven’t browsed the other nfs-* scripts to see what else I can set. I can try that later but I don’t know if I’ll understand what I’m doing enough for that to be helpful.

It seems clear to me that nfs isn’t working correctly but why?