Free DLNA serv­er which works good with my Sony BRAVIA TV

In sev­er­al pre­vi­ous posts I wrote about my quest for the right source for­mat to stream video to my Sony BRAVIA TV (build in 2009). The last week-end I final­ly found some­thing which sat­is­fies me.

What I found was servi­io, a free UPnP-AV (DLNA) serv­er. It is writ­ten in java and runs on Win­dows, Lin­ux and FreeB­SD (it is not list­ed on the web­site, but we have an not-so-up-to-date ver­sion in the ports tree). If nec­es­sary it transcodes the input to an appro­pri­ate for­mat for the DLNA ren­der­er (in my case the TV).

I test­ed it with my slow Net­book, so that I was able to see with which input for­mat it will just remux the input con­tain­er to a MPEG trans­port stream, and which input for­mat would be real­ly re-encoded to a for­mat the TV understands.

The bot­tom line of the tests is, that I just need to use a sup­port­ed con­tain­er (like MKV or MP4 or AVI) with H.264-encoded video (e.g. encod­ed by x264) and AC3 audio.

The TV is able to chose between sev­er­al audio streams, but I have not test­ed if servi­io is able to serve files with mul­ti­ple audio streams (my wife has a dif­fer­ent moth­er lan­guage than me, so it is inter­est­ing for us to have mul­ti­ple audio streams for a movie), and I do not know if DLNA sup­ports some­thing like this.

Now I just have to replace minidl­na (which only works good with my TV for MP3s and Pic­tures) with servi­io on my FreeB­SD file serv­er and we can for­get about the disk-juggling.

Jumstart/JET for FreeB­SD (brain­storm­ing)

There are some HOW­TOs out there in the net which describe some auto­mat­ic net­work based install via PXE-booting a machine from a serv­er which has a spe­cif­ic FreeB­SD release in the PXE-booting area and a non-interactive con­fig for sysin­stall to install this FreeB­SD ver­sion on the machine which PXE-boots this.

The set­up of this is com­plete­ly man­u­al and only allows to net­boot one FreeB­SD ver­sion. The server-side set­up for the clients is also com­plete­ly man­u­al (and only allows to install one client at a time, it seems). This is not very user-friendly, and far away from the pow­er of Jumpstart/JET for Solaris where you cre­ate a tem­plate (maybe from anoth­er tem­plate with auto­mat­ic val­ue (IP, name, MAC) replace­ment) and can spec­i­fy dif­fer­ent OS releas­es for dif­fer­ent clients and then just run a com­mand to gen­er­ate a good con­fig for this.

I thought a lit­tle bit how it could be done and decid­ed to write down all the stuff (so far 160 lines, 830 words) to not for­get some details. All in all I think this could be done (at least a sen­si­ble sub­set) in a week or two (full­time) if you have the hard­ware, moti­va­tion, and time. As always, the prob­lems are with­in the details, so I may be off with my esti­ma­tion a lit­tle bit (also depends upon the knowledge-level (shell, tftp, dhcpd, install-software) of the per­son doing this).

Unfor­tu­nate­ly I do not know if I have the hard­ware at home to do some­thing like this. I have some unused hard­disks which could be used in a machine which is used tem­po­rary as a test-install-client (nor­mal­ly I use this machines as my Desk­top… if I do not use my lit­tle Net­book instead, as I do not do much at home cur­rent­ly), but I’ve nev­er checked if this machine is PXE-booting-capable (VIA KT133 chipset with a 3Com 3c905C-TX Fast Ether­link XL). I also do not have the time to do this (with the cur­rent rate of free time I would expect to need about a year), except maybe some­one would call my boss and nego­ti­ate something.

I can not remem­ber any request to have some­thing like this on the freebsd-current, freebsd-arch or freebsd-hackers list since I read them (and that is since about at least 3.0‑RELEASE). Is this because near­ly nobody is inter­est­ed in some­thing like this, or are the cur­rent pos­si­bil­i­ties enough for your needs? Do you work at a place where this would be wel­come (= direct­ly used when it would be done)? If you use a sim­ple solu­tion to make a net-install, what is your expe­ri­ence with this (pros/cons)?

All inter­nal ser­vices migrat­ed to IPv6

In the last days I migrat­ed all my inter­nal ser­vices to IPv6.

All my jails have an IPv4 and an IPv6 address now. All Apach­es (I have one for my pic­ture gallery, one for web­mail, and one for inter­nal man­age­ment) now lis­ten on the inter­nal IPv6 address too. Squid is updat­ed from 2.x to 3.1 (the most recent ver­sion in the Ports Col­lec­tion) and I added some IPv6 ACLs. The inter­nal Post­fix is con­fig­ured to han­dle IPv6 too (it is deliv­er­ing every­thing via an authen­ti­cat­ed and encrypt­ed chan­nel to a machine with a sta­t­ic IPv4 address for final deliv­ery). My MySQL does not need an IPv6 address, as it is only lis­ten­ing to requests via IPC (the sock­et is hardlinked between jails). All ssh dae­mons are con­fig­ured to lis­ten to IPv6 too. The IMAP and CUPS serv­er was pick­ing the new IPv6 address­es auto­mat­i­cal­ly. I also updat­ed Sam­ba to han­dle IPv6, but due to lack of a Win­dows machine which prefers IPv6 over IPv4 for CIFS access (at least I think my Win­dows XP net­book only tries IPv4 con­nec­tions) I can not real­ly test this.

Only my Wii is a lit­tle bit behind, and I have not checked if my Sony-TV will DTRT (but for this I first have to get some time to have a look if I have to update my DD-WRT firmware on the lit­tle WLAN-router which is “extend­ing the cable” from the TV to the inter­nal net­work, and I have to look how to con­fig­ure IPv6 with DD-WRT).

IPv6 in my WLAN

The man­u­fac­tur­er of my WLAN router released a new firmware. It con­tains IPv6 and DNSSEC sup­port. I got a lit­tle bit of time and pow­er to install it. Unfor­tu­nate­ly my ISP does not pro­vide IPv6 connectivity.

I have now installed the IPv6 sup­port in Win­dows XP for the Net­book, cre­at­ed (and reg­is­tered) an ULA pre­fix at SixXS, and ver­i­fied that the net­work stack of XP gets it from the WLAN router.

When I do an IPv6 ping from the lap­top to the router, it works, but the IPv6 address does not show up in the Home­net­work overview of the router. Seems they still have some work to do.

Regard­ing DNSSEC I do not see any options in the man­age­ment inter­face, but I assume it just means that the DNS serv­er does the right thing when he is con­front­ed with recur­sive DNSSEC requests. No idea if he will val­i­date him­self and if yes, if he will add some log mes­sages regard­ing it or not.

I do not like being ill

Unfor­tu­nate­ly you can not chose…

So, I am now on the sofa, cov­ered a lot (a flu, I even have no voice any­more; before I left work a female cowork­er told that her hus­band would prob­a­bly be hap­py if this would hap­pen to her…  😀 ) and med­ica­tion and water are not far away on the table.

The good thing with the cur­rent tech­nol­o­gy is, that you can still be a lit­tle bit pro­duc­tive (depend­ing on the illness).

As you can read this, it means I have my net­book with me, so that I can take care about some sim­ple things.