Years ago I built a media server on Solaris 11 11/11 with Fuppes. It worked great, until I upgraded to 11.1, when it broke. As that was pretty much all the box did, I rolled back to 11/11 and everything was fine. But recently I decided that a three year old OS wasn’t on, and moved to 11.2. Again, Fuppes broke. So much for binary compatibility. I spent a weekend in mdb and scat, but with next to no C++ knowledge and severely rusty debugging skills, I wasn’t able to fix the problem. (A segfault caused by the HTTP server part of Fuppes.)

I messed about with alternatives, but I couldn’t get anything working on Solaris which I liked, so I was without a media server. I set one up on a Linux box, but that was too many boxes, and I don’t like Linux. Then I thought about getting a Raspberry Pi, and running that as a media server, NFS mounting the content from the Solaris box. Before I did that, I looked to make sure I could run a UPnP server on Raspberry Pi, and that led me to MiniDLNA. I looked at the source, and I thought “I bet that runs on Solaris”. It does. In fact, it turns out to be smaller, more stable, and with better functionality than Fuppes.

Building ffmpeg

MiniDLNA is a full-fledged media server. It deals in all manner of things, and to do that, it uses ffmpeg. So, get that and build it. At the time of writing the latest and (presumably) greatest is 2.4.2, so I got that.

ffmpeg can deal with all the audio and video codecs under the Sun, but all I want is something to stream FLACs to my DS. So, I’m going to disable pretty much all functionality. If you want to serve video, that will work just fine.

I’m building with GCC. Years ago I would have fought the good fight and done what I could to get it built with Sun Studio, but that war’s been lost, I’m too old to care these days.

I want FLAC and MP3 support, and I also want to display JPEG cover art, so I’m going to need those libraries.

# pkg install image/library/libexif codec/ogg-vorbis codec/flac

Don’t worry: they won’t pull in a load of junk and pollute your system.

We’re going to need the shared libraries later, and you have to ask for them.

$ ./configure --prefix=/usr/local/ffmpeg \
  --enable-shared \
  --disable-static \
  --disable-ffmpeg \
  --disable-ffplay \
  --disable-ffprobe \
  --disable-ffserver \
  --disable-doc \
  --disable-swscale-alpha \
  --disable-swresample \
  --disable-swscale \
  --disable-postproc \
  --disable-avfilter \
  --disable-network \
  --disable-dct \
  --disable-dwt \
  --disable-lsp \
  --disable-mdct \
  --disable-rdft \
  --disable-fft \
  --disable-faan \
  --disable-pixelutils \
  --disable-everything \
  --disable-xlib \
  --disable-debug
$ gmake -j4

That, shock of shocks, compiles cleanly for me first time and, as we’re compiling so little, it’s very quick. Installation, however, doesn’t work:

# gmake install
INSTALL libavdevice/libavdevice.a
find: cycle detected for /lib/secure/32/
...
find: cycle detected for /usr/lib/link_audit/32/
install: libavdevice.a was not found anywhere!
gmake: *** [install-libavdevice-static] Error 2

This is an easy fix though:

$ vim +101 config.mak

and change the =install to =ginstall. Then, assuming you have GNU install, you can gmake install and all will be good.

Building MiniDLNA

Now, get MiniDLNA. I used version 1.1.4. I’d have like to have built a static binary, and just dropped that into its own zone, but as Oracle don’t give us static versions of libjpeg, libsqlite3 and so on, that would require a fair bit of legwork.

There are a couple of things I wanted to change. First, I hate that stupid Linux penguin and, by default, that is the icon you’ll get for your MiniDNLA server if you build on Solaris. Let’s honour SunOS’s BSD heritage by forcing it to usethe BSD daemon instead.

$ vi +1104 icons.c

and change the elif to #elifdef __Solaris__.

Next, stop MiniDLNA resizing cover art to 160x160 pixels. I believe the UPnP spec caps cover art at 500x500px, so let’s use that.

$ gsed -i 's/160/500/g' albumart.c
$ CFLAGS="-I/usr/local/ffmpeg/include" \
  LDFLAGS="-L/usr/local/ffmpeg/lib" \
  ./configure --prefix=/usr/local/minidlna \
  --with-os-name=Solaris --with-os-version=11.2

Now you have config.h, add

#define __Solaris__

somewhere near the top, and try a gmake. It will pretty quickly hit the buffers with:

gmake[2]: Entering directory `/build/minidlna-1.1.4'
CC       image_utils.o
image_utils.c:39:20: error: endian.h: No such file or directory

Which is a perfectly valid error, as Solaris doesn’t have endian.h. Instead, it keeps its definitions of endianness, alignment and whatnot, in isa_defs.h. So:

$ ggrep -rl '<endian.h>' . | while read f
> do
> gsed -i 's|<endian.h>|<sys/isa_defs.h>|' $f
> done

No, I’m not doing this properly. I’m not making patch files or adding proper includes. This is a purely selfish “make it work” approach.

Run gmake again, and it’ll crap out with a load of undefined symbols. As is so often the case with Solaris, we’ll have to tell the linker to use the socket libraries. Less usually, we have to tell it to link against libsendfile.

$ vim +407 Makefile

And add

-lsocket \
-lnsl \
-lsendfile \

to the minidlnad_LDADD line. Run gmake again, and it still won’t work:

Undefined                       first referenced
 symbol                             in file
MAX                                 minidlna.o
MIN                                 upnphttp.o

What? I don’t recall those being in the standard library. Remember: we’re in the world of Linux here, where bad code and no thought of side-effects rule. You’re going to have to add macros for MAX and MIN which, I presume, already exist in glibc. (Though, of course, glibc is technically nothing to do with Linux.)

The block of code which will do the fix needs to look something like this

#define MAX(a,b) ((a) > (b) ? a : b)
#define MIN(a,b) ((a) < (b) ? a : b)

and if you pop it into the top of config.h it’ll get everywhere it needs to. Run gmake one last time and everything will be built. gmake install as root, and you have everything you need in /usr/local/minidlna and /usr/local/ffmpeg. Pick those up, drop them in a zone, and you’re pretty much done. Alternatively, package them up with fpm.

$ fpm -s dir -t solaris  -v 2.4.2 -n SNLTDffmpeg /usr/local/ffmpeg
$ fpm -s dir -t solaris  -v 1.1.4 -n SNLTDminidlna /usr/local/minidlna

Installing and Configuring

I moved my binaries to a clean, minimal zone, and I found a bunch of shared libs were missing, even after telling the runtime linker where FFMPEG was:

# crle -u -l /usr/local/ffmpeg/lib
$ find /usr/local/minidlna -follow -type f | xargs ldd 2>/dev/null | grep "not found" | sort -u
libexif.so.12 =>    (file not found)
libFLAC.so.8 =>     (file not found)
libid3tag.so.0 =>   (file not found)
libogg.so.0 =>      (file not found)
libvorbis.so.0 =>   (file not found)

To fix this, I just had to run the pkg command from the top of the page.

I created a config file at /config/minidlna/minidlna.conf with the following contents:

media_dir=A,/storage/flac
friendly_name=tap-media
album_art_names=front.jpg
db_dir=/var/cache/minidlna
log_dir=/var/log
inotify=no

Then imported the following service manifest:

<pre>
<?xml version='1.0'?>
<!DOCTYPE service_bundle SYSTEM '/usr/share/lib/xml/dtd/service_bundle.dtd.1'>
<service_bundle type='manifest' name='export'>
  <service name='snltd/minidlna' type='service' version='0'>
    <create_default_instance enabled='true'/>
    <single_instance/>
    <dependency name='filesystem' grouping='require_all' restart_on='none' type='service'>
      <service_fmri value='svc:/system/filesystem/local'/>
    </dependency>
    <dependency name='network' grouping='require_all' restart_on='none' type='service'>
      <service_fmri value='svc:/network/initial'/>
    </dependency>
    <exec_method
      name='start'
      type='method'
      exec='/usr/local/minidlna/sbin/minidlnad -u minidlna -f /config/minidlna/minidlna.conf'
      timeout_seconds='30'/>
    <exec_method name='stop' type='method' exec=':kill' timeout_seconds='30'>
    </exec_method>
    <stability value='Unstable'/>
    <template>
      <common_name>
        <loctext xml:lang='C'>minidlna UPnP server</loctext>
      </common_name>
    </template>
  </service>
</service_bundle>
</pre>

And I was off.

Update

I’ve written a Puppet module to do the installation.