After a lot of banging my head against a wall, I solved an interesting problem I had been seeing when accessing music on my computer remotely. Google wasn't much help in solving it, so I figured I'd mention it on my blog in the hopes that perhaps it would save someone some frustration.
I have set up my home network to allow access to the music collection on my Mac Mini using a tool called MP3 Sushi which is really just a slick wrapper around gnump3d, a free, open source tool for streaming MP3s. The idea is that no matter where I am -- if I have my laptop PC and broadband access, I've got tunes. I can fire up a browser, select what I want to play, and stream the M3U playlist to Winamp.
The problem was that, at my parents place, whenever I would access the music, in less than a minute their router (a Linksys BEFW11S4, version 4) would totally freeze up. It would have to be power cycled to start working again after crashing. I spent a lot of time debugging the issue. I tried upgrading and downgrading the router firmware. I tried different MTU sizes (since it's a DSL connection using PPPoE). No joy. The problem didn't seem to occur on my parents laptop, so I thought maybe it was something to do with my wireless network settings. I tried several permutations of those, to no avail.
Finally, I decided to try and copy every detail from my parents laptop. Instead of using Winamp, that laptop was using Windows Media Player. I switched to using that, and voila, it worked!
There seems to be some interaction between Winamp (version 5.093) and the Linksys BEFW11S4 router (version 4, firmware 1.50.14 - 1.52.02) whereby streaming M3U files causes the router to crash, hard. Certainly, the router should not crash like that regardless of the data traffic, but I wonder what Winamp is doing differently than WMP when playing the M3U stream that causes the router to curl up and die like that?
How did you setup a streaming server in the first place? Can you explain in detail?
Are you using wordpress for you blogs? Good job. Really impressive.
Setting up the MP3 server using MP3 Sushi was very simple, just installed MP3 Sushi on my Mac Mini, pointed it to my MP3s and it indexed them and presented a webpage allowing streaming via port 8888. I then opened port 8888 on my router, and voila I had access to all my tunes from the internet.
However, as I have slowly moved to using iTunes to manage my music, I have chosen to use iTunes music sharing as my preferred way of streaming music. iTunes music sharing is set up to only work on local/home networks, but it can tunneled via SSH. Setting this up is a bit complex, but it's more secure, and ultimately more satisifying since all the music meta data is available on the remote end. A quick guide to doing this can be found here:
http://www.idealog.us/2004/10/remotely_stream.html
I am not currently using WordPress for this blog, I am using MovableType.