Ssh tunnels, read-only & auto resume questions

Pi MusicBox
1

I have 49 raspberry pi’s playing music in retail stores. I’m currently running raspbian lite, and omxplayer is playing local music on the micro sd.

I want to convert to streaming music though, so I’ve set up a streaming server and now I’m looking for a streaming client, and Pi MusicBox seems like a good choice.

Currently the raspberry pi’s are configured to create reverse ssh tunnels to my server, in order for me to be able to manage them remotely. They do that using simple bash scripts & ssh client.

Also, to avoid corruption issues, I have the micro sd’s configured as read-only, which dramatically improved their life span, and reduced corruptions to a minimum.

My questions:

  1. Will I be able to run my bash scripts on Pi MusicBox to recreate my reverse ssh tunnel? I’m only asking this because I’m guessing that Pi MusicBox is a cut down version of a Linux system.

  2. Can I run Pi MusicBox as read-only? Or is it already running as read-only? I’m asking this because I noticed that any change I make, Pi MusicBox requires a restart, which makes me assume that it writes changes to memory, and then to the sd during the restart.

  3. if the streaming server is down, and the audio stream is disconnected, can Pi MusicBox automatically resume playing music, without requiring a restart? Or any manual interaction for that matter.

Thanks for your support.

2

I don’t personally think pimusicbox is a good fit for this purpose. Playing a single stream is a much simpler use case and I think all the other pimusicbox stuff and design choices would just get in your way. Plus it already sounds like you know what you are doing. I think I’d just use vanilla mpd or maybe something even simpler (do you even need remote control).

However, to. answer your questions.

  1. It’s based on raspbian wheezy, not a cut down version. That would be fine.

  2. It isn’t configured to be read-only right now. It would be a fair bit of work (for you) to get this going. If you want more stability, check out industrial sd cards, they are really solid.

  3. Yes, it should recover.

In general, we restart after changing most (not all) settings only as a shortcut to get back to a known working state. Only a few things actually require a restart (changing soundcards etc).

3

thanks for you reply and the information.

4

Hello! I am trying to do something similar. Did you find a good set of tools? Did you try with vanilla mdp or other? Thanks!