sharing music from remote servers to iTunes

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A few days ago a new housemate showed me how to share music with
others in the house running iTunes, using its sharing features.

I was happy to find it was really easy to share the music from
my Ubuntu Linux system as well: just apt-get install mt-daapd,
then browse to http://localhost:3689/ (username "", password
"mt-daapd") for quick and easy configuration with a nice web
interface.

But I only have about 10% of my music collection on my laptop;
the rest is on one of my servers far away, and I wanted to have
access to that too. (my main motivation in doing this aside from
sharing music with my friends is to be able to play my music on
the good stereo system in our living room downstairs, which is
connected to another housemate's mac running iTunes)

That proved a bit more difficult: installing the latest mt-daapd
was slightly more involved on debian than on ubuntu, and once I
had installed it I found that iTunes doesn't let you connect to
remote servers, only those on the local network. [1]

I worked around that by setting up an ssh tunnel on my wireless
router (a linksys wrt54g running tomato firmware [2]), a la:

 $ ssh [email protected]
 ...
 # ssh [email protected] -N -f -g -L 3689:foo.example.net:3689

but to be visible to iTunes it needs to be advertised on the
local network using zeroconf/rendezvous; to accomplish that I
added a file (attached) to /etc/avahi/services/ on my ubuntu
laptop pointing to the entry point of the ssh tunnel on my router.

The tomato.local hostname is defined in my /etc/avahi/hosts:

   192.168.1.1 tomato.local

I'd like to find a way to run the zeroconf/rendezvous stuff directly
on my wireless router so it will work even when my laptop is away
or turned off. But this seems to work OK for now.

(I could have set up the ssh tunnel on my laptop instead of on
the router, but I wanted to avoid having dependencies on my laptop,
and I already have a mt-daapd on port 3689 on my laptop, sharing
its music.)

I found out about this avahi.service stuff thanks to the excellent
info in this post: http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=48558

[1] http://wiki.mt-daapd.org/wiki/SSH_Tunnel
[2] http://www.polarcloud.com/tomato

--
Gerald Oskoboiny <[email protected]>
http://impressive.net/people/gerald/

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<!DOCTYPE service-group SYSTEM "avahi-service.dtd">

<!-- See avahi.service(5) for more information about this configuration file -->

<!-- adapted from http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=48558 - g -->

<service-group>

 <name>Ger's tunes</name>

 <service>
   <host-name>tomato.local</host-name>
   <type>_daap._tcp</type>
   <port>3689</port>
 </service>
 
 <service>
   <host-name>tomato.local</host-name>
   <type>_rsp._tcp</type>
   <port>3689</port>
 </service>

</service-group>

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