The New Hotness

Sometimes you (well, I) want a bit of late-night music, which is now one button press away. However, I initially set things up so the Raspberry Pi’s startup code executed a Python script on a network share from the file server in the basement, which shuts down around midnight after the daily backup.

Keeping a local copy meant having to update that copy whenever I tweak the code, a nuisance not to be tolerated. This Bash (or whatever) code in /etc/rc.local figures out if the server is up and, if so, updates the local copy from the server. If the server isn’t up, then it just runs with what it has:

#!/bin/sh
# was !/bin/sh -e

... snippage ...

server=192.168.1.4

ping -c 1 $server
if [ $? -eq 0 ]
then
  mount -o ro ${server}:/mnt/bulkdata/Project\ Files/Streaming\ Media\ Player/Firmware/ /mnt/part
  rsync -auv /mnt/part/Streamer.py /home/pi
  umount /mnt/part
fi

sudo -u pi sh -c 'python /home/pi/Streamer.py any' &

N.B.: you must remove the -e from the shebang, because otherwise the script jams to a stop when the ping fails. Took me a while to figure that out, yup.

Use raspi-config to force the startup sequence to wait until the network is available. Turns out that the DHCP process can stall for half a minute, so fixed timeouts don’t work.

Hardcoding the server IP address eliminates a whole bunch of mysterious failures apparently due to whatever handles the translation from mollusk.local to the dotted quad. Maybe that’s not really a problem, but I’ll run with it.

Now the streamers fetch the Latest and Greatest version whenever they’re on during the day and run their local copy, with the room parameter telling it where it lives.

Life is good!