The Tool Shed: NAS
The Story
So you've decided to use a thin client instead of a workstation so you can finally hear the sound of silence in your cubicle. Good move, the white noise of a half-dozen fans and drives will slowly drive you insane.
Speaking of sounds ... what are you going to do about playing MP3s? Without the irambling throaty lyrics of John Lee Hooker, how are you gping to able to cope? Panic washes over you like ice water.
Suddenly, you eyes focus on the little 1/4'' mic and headphone jacks on the thin client.
``What?'' you think, ``How is that supposed to work? X only does the display!''
And, of course, you're right. X makes the display network-transparent. What you need, young grasshopper, is the network audio system (NAS). It makes the audio network-transparent.
A few trips to the FreeBSD ports tree later, and you're set. Mr. Hooker once again helps to keep the peace in the land of the SysAdmins.
The Details
NAS is in the FreeBSD ports tree (in the audio/nas directory). It provides a set of basic clients (like auplay for basic .wav files) and the nasd server.
nasd is an interesting creature. It requires that audio applications be aware of it in order to do it's magic, so check out the Makefile options to mpg123 (for example) to make it NAS-aware. They have to be configured to send their output stream to nasd, generally by using the and option like "-audio tcp/localhost:8000" (much like -geometry). In turn, nasd sends the stream over the network to whereever the environment variable AUDIOSERVER points (or DISPLAY, which is often the right answer for a thin client anyway).
After logging in to a host running nasd from a NAS-capable thin client (like an NCD 451 or an IBM Network Station 1000), check out the output of auinfo. It gives details of your current NAS connection. The man page helps explain what the copious output means.
There are more details at this NAS links page.
The Wrap-up
Content to have music streamed to your thin client, you think you're ready to handy whatever todays emergencies might be.
Without warning, the music stops. ``That's odd,'' you think, ``my ssh session isn't responding either.''
If only there was a nice article on monitoring a network, you might not have been caught by surprise ...
