Windows Home Server and Squeezebox
Saturday, September 27, 2008 – 3:00 PM
So having got my home server up and running I finally got around to getting music streaming off it into my living room with a Logitech Squeezebox Duet.
First off this is not an appliance, it’s a science project, albeit a really good one. I spent a happy hour fiddling with MAC addresses and WEP keys to get everything up and running. It’s not something my mother would thank me for. There are a couple of gotchas I ran into setting it all up which I thought I’d share.
Installing and setting up SqueezeCenter as a service
First you need to install SqueezeCenter on your home server. Download the SqueezeCenter software from the slimdevices web site.
- When prompted save it to the Software folder shared on your server, \\MyServer\Software\. Don’t run the software on your PC, when the download completes just close the dialog. SqueezeCenter needs to be installed on the server.
- Next use Remote Desktop to log directly into your home server. Open the Start | Run… menu and type “MSTSC”. In the Remote Desktop Connection dialog type in the name of your home server. At the login dialog type in your home server password.
This should be fairly straightforward but I’ve seen people struggle with it so thought it was worth mentioning.
By default SqueezeCenter will install on the C: drive on Windows Home Server. This is a bad idea because WHS has a very small system drive. You should install any additional software on the D: drive along with your data to prevent the system drive from filling up.
- In your remote desktop use Windows Explorer to create a “D:\Program Files” folder on the server.
- From the remote console desktop open the “Shared Folders on Server” shortcut and navigate to the Software folder and run “SqueezeCenter-7.2.exe” to install SqueezeCenter.
- In the Select Destination Location dialog edit the path to “D:\Program Files\SqueezeCenter”. Accept the defaults for other pages on the setup program.
If you haven’t done so already you might be tempted to install the latest browser on your home server as the SqueezeCenter page suggests. I didn’t do this as I try and install the minimum amount of unnecessary software on my servers. Normally you’ll be accessing SqueezeCenter from another PC with the latest version of your favorite browser, not the WHS desktop.
Finally you need to configure SqueezeCenter to run as a server so it starts automatically when the home server does.
- Run “Start | All Programs | SqueezeCenter | SqueezeCenter Startup options”.
- Select the “Start SqueezeCenter automatically” option and enter your user username and password. Don’t use the server administrator password. Ideally you should use a WHS user account that’s not used for anything else or your own user account but not the administrator one. See comments for an explanation of why you should not run the SqueezeCenter as an administrator.
Use the “Start | Log Off” button to end your remote desktop session on the server. You should now be able to connect to SqueezeCenter http://MyServer:9000/ from any PC in on your network.
Wireless network configuration
I’m using a Microsoft MN-700 Wireless network hub that runs an 801.11g network. The Squeezebox controller handles input of the WEP/WPA key just fine but I found it easier to turn off MAC address filtering on my router while getting things setup. Once you have things working the MAC addresses of for the controller and receiver are in “Settings > Advanced > About” and “Settings > Advanced > Squeezebox” Information respectively. Add the MAC addresses to the router’s filter table and turn on MAC filtering and everything should just keep working.
The home server is a fairly beefy machine. Most of the really negative reviews on Amazon tend to be focused around either poor network or server performance. Overall I’ve been very pleased with the Squeezebox. My setup doesn’t suffer from dropouts and streams lossless FLAC files just fine. If you run into difficulties is seems like the first place to look is your wireless router and network configuration. After that start looking at the load on the server especially if you are using a format, like WMA lossless, that requires SqueezeCenter to transcode music on the fly.
Welcome to my blog on software development and probably a whole lot more.
28 Responses to “Windows Home Server and Squeezebox”
I appreciate the write up. I just bought a WHS and want to get a SqueezeBox next. Did you stick with the 512Mb RAM on the WHS or did you have to upgrade it?
By Richard Watson on Sep 28, 2008
Richard,
I just looked at my server. Squeezebox isn’t exactly the smallest application you’ve ever seen
Currently the machine is using 655Mb while steaming music. So a 0.5Gb memory machine would be paging at this point.
If it were me I’d try installing the software on the WHS as is but factor the cost of the RAM into my purchasing decision because it’s pretty likely you’ll need it.
Ade
By Ade Miller on Sep 28, 2008
Hi
One little question, you stress NOT to use the
administrator user when starting SqueezeCenter as a service, why ?
Finn
Denmark
By Finn Brodersen on Sep 30, 2008
Finn,
If you use the administrator account this means that SqueezeCenter is running as a service under the local administator user and has full rights to your server. This is a security risk as you have given SqueezeCenter more permissions than it really needs. So if someone were to attack your machine through SqueezeCenter they would be able to do anything an administrator could do on the server.
If you run the service either under your WHS (non-admin) user account then you are no worse off than you were if you ran SqueezeCenter from your desktop. An attack who gains entry via SqueezeCenter has your rights and not that of the administator.
Better still you could create an account for SqueezeCenter with no additional rights to WHS shares or web access. This would further limit access to the server should a hacker compromise SqueezeCenter. Create an additional SqueezeCenter account, say called SqueezeService, with minimal rights – no access to shares or ability to configure WHS or access it via the web.
Note that I’m not saying that SqueezeCenter is insecure. I’m saying that it’s good practice to not give programs or services running on your server more rights than they really need to do their job. In this case SqueezeCenter definitely does not need to be an administrator.
Hope this makes sense.
Ade
By Ade Miller on Sep 30, 2008
A note for those who use PVConnect (Twonky) Media Streamer add-in on their MSS box:
PVConnect also uses the port 9000. So, it may clash with Squeeze Center. You may want to get into the settings page of PVConnect and change the value (default is 0) to something else.
Squeeze Center doesn’t seem have a way (at least for me) to change the port number.
-Arvind
By Arvind on Oct 6, 2008
Arvind,
You can actually change the default SqueezeCenter port, it’s in the Adevanced tab under settings:
http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=47107
You may have to modify your firewall to allow access to the new port. The following post shows you how to do this:
https://www.ripcaster.co.uk/node/316
It also gives details of how to manually hack the SqueezeCenter prefs file to change the port number. I’d use the advanced settings on SqueezeCenter, it’s a lot simpler.
Ade
By Ade Miller on Oct 6, 2008
Thanks for the details Ade. I didn’t know that.
-Arvind
By Arvind on Oct 6, 2008
I logged onto RD using Administrator and server password. Opened the \\servername\Software folder from the desktop shortcut. I then double-clicked the exe : “Windows cannot access the specified device, path, or file. You may not have the appropriate permissions to access this item”.
Perplexed – I’m logged on as the Admin, how can I not have rights? Any ideas as to what I might be overlooking? Just got my WHS, and looking to serve up my flac collection to my squeezebox too.
By Stephen on Oct 13, 2008
Stephen,
The share probably isn’t accessible from the admin account via the network. Instead of \\servername\Software\ try d:\Shares\Software\ this is the actual location.
Ade
By Ade Miller on Oct 14, 2008
Thanks, I actually just dragged the exe to my desktop and it installed just fine. Thanks for this post; very helpful.
Ended up changing the PVConnect port to 9090; it was clashing with Softsqueeze which I was using to test the Slimserver install.
By Stephen on Oct 17, 2008
I have an HP Windows Home Server and an HP PC running Vista. On neither do I have the option to run MSTSC so I am really struggling to follow your instructions. I have set up a “programs” folder on my WHS within “software” & have tried installing to there whilst logged on via my console using my administrator password but I just get an “access denied” error message after I select “install”
By Nick Drury on Oct 30, 2008
I’m hoping you’re still monitoring comments for this post and might have some idea…
I followed the instructions here (and I also referenced yours):
https://www.ripcaster.co.uk/node/321
…and I’m having a heck of a time getting it to work. Any advice would be appreciated. The problem is that on my WHS, when I’m logged into it via remote desktop, when I right-click on SqueezeCenter in my system tray and select “Open SqueezeCenter”, it tries to go to http://127.0.0.1:9000 and it fails. I get an HTTP 500 Internal Server Error.
I’ve confirmed that I’ve added http://127.0.0.1 to the trusted sites list, but it simply won’t load.
I’m baffled and extremely frustrated. Any ideas?
By Jason Dunn on Nov 3, 2008
Just as a follow up, I solved the problem via a suggestion from someone inside the Logitech forums: I configured SqueezeCenter from another browser on my network by going to the IP address of my WHS and using port 9000. So while I’m still curious as to why I couldn’t get the SqueezeCenter software to load on my WHS, ultimately my problem has been solved.
By the way, your quote about this product being like a science experiment is spot-on. I’ll be linking to your blog post here and quoting that line when I publish my review of this product.
By Jason Dunn on Nov 3, 2008
Jason,
Glad you solved your issue.
Stephen,
How are you trying to run MSTSC? You should be able to start it from the Run prompt or look for it in the programs menu as Remote Console.
Ade
By Ade Miller on Nov 3, 2008
Once I found MSTSC your intructions worked a dream and I was able to sort various problems out.
By Nick Drury on Nov 5, 2008
Nick,
Glad to hear you got things working. The original instructions were written for XP SP2, I should have been clearer about that.
Ade
By Ade Miller on Nov 7, 2008
Thansk for the very, very good write-up, best that I could find on Internet. I have just installed HP Windows Media Server and considering music streaming. This is what I needed.
Petri
By Petri I. Salonen on Jan 2, 2009
Ade, I have an HP Mediasmart runnign Squeezecenter to a Squeezebox 3. Music is all WMA Lossless. I have not been able to get it to stream music out of my router/firewall to a laptop with Softsqueeze to to get the squeeze.mp3 stream to work. I’m using xxx.homeserver.com URL and I can successfully access xxx.homeserver.com:9000 to control Squeezecenter. I can stream mp3 files out through the firewall but not WMA lossless. Any ideas? many thanks
Sanjay
By Sanjay on Jan 16, 2009
Sanjay,
Have you seen this thread? Seems like WMA is being transcoded to MP3 before it gets pushed across the network.
http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=42285
Have you tried running softsqueeze on the WHS and see if it works locally?
ade
By Ade Miller on Jan 18, 2009
I installed SqueezeCenter on my HP Mediasmart server but now get regular error messages that there is a file sharing conflict between SqueezeCenter.exe and MYSQLD.exe Has anyone encountered this problem and if so is there a workaround?
By Ron Pearrow on Feb 17, 2009
I tracked down the cause of the file sharing conflict. Evidently if Squeezecenter is active for a prolonged time it cannot be backed up and generates a File Sharing Conflict – File Open- message. The fix seems to be to make sure SqueezeCenter is turned off for some period each 24 hours.
By Ron Pearrow on Feb 18, 2009
Hello,
Thank you for the excellent write up. I currently have Squeezecenter and all my music on a Readynas Duo…..but when I access the Squeezecenter web interface from another computer on the network to browse music it is annoyingly slow (15-20 seconds for page refresh), probably due to lack of CPU power in the Readynas Duo. Rescans are also very slow. I have been looking for a faster solution. Readynas Pro seems too expensive. HP Mediasmart seems well priced.
How would you rate the speed of the web interface for Squeezecenter on your HP Mediasmart installation ?
Thanks.
By Tony on Mar 17, 2009
Correction – just realized you installed Squeezecenter on your home built server (not an HP Mediasmart). How is the Squeezecenter web interface performance on your server ?
By Tony on Mar 18, 2009
It performs fine on the server I have but then I (somewhat) deliberately over spec’ed the machine because I knew I’d be running SqueezeCenter and Subversion on it, and maybe some other stuff. Otherwise the obvious processor to go for would be an atom.
Ade
By Ade Miller on Mar 18, 2009
Greetings –
I’ve noticed that Squeezebox Server is now released as an Add-In. Would you still advocate installing the add-in under user space?
Thanks!
-t
By Tyler on Jan 5, 2010
Tyler,
I’ve not looked at this. My expereince of “upgrading” Squeezebox software has been variable at best so I’ve largely stuck with the version I first installed. Next time I have a soare moment I’ll take a look.
Ade
By Ade Miller on Jan 5, 2010