Webmin Cron Jobs

[burn-e86]

I'm trying to get my server to run the Playstation Media Server on boot. Unfortunately my skills with Linux really are not that good. Currently to run it i use Putty and run:
/home/user/pms/java -jar pms.jar
which runs the server in the terminal. Does anyone know how I would go around sceduling a Cron job for this?
When I copy the command into the cron job it says that it cannot find /java.
Failing running it using cron. can someone help me run it at boot?

[burble]

Cron isn't the way to do this. Cron is meant for scheduled jobs on an hourly, daily (and so on) basis. What'll happen here is that every time the cron job runs the media server will start but you only want a single instance of it running. Now that shouldn't be a problem because once the first instance is running any subsequent instances should exit as the first instance will already be bound on the port.

When you SSH in using PuTTY, do you literally type /home/user/pms/java -jar pms.jar to run the media server or do you just do java -jar pms.jar? The key difference there is with the first one you're saying that the java executable is in /home/user/pms which I expect isn't the case. You should be able to create a startup action that runs 'java -jar /home/user/pms/pms.jar' which would run the java executable that is in $PATH and then load the JAR file specified. Failing that when you're SSH'd in type 'which java' and you'll get a path back, something like /usr/bin/java (the exact path can vary depending on what Linux distro you're running) so in that case the command you need is '/usr/bin/java -jar /home/user/pms/pms.jar'

It has been ages since I used webmin but from what I remember creating a startup action is pretty self explainatory once you know the command you want to run.

[aidanjt]

Actually, you can use cron to start programmes when the system cron daemon starts by using @reboot instead of the time specification. There are a number of @ pesudo-time specifiers.

anyway, log into the machine and type crontab -e and enter as follows:

@reboot ${HOME}/pms/java -jar ${HOME}/pms/pms.jar

I assume your default text editor is nano so just Ctrl+O, then Enter to save, and Ctrl+x to quit.

[burn-e86]

Thanks for all your help, I got it running using a cron job with the command
@reboot /usr/bin/java -jar ${HOME}/PMS/pms.jar

The only problem i've got now is when I play anything that requires transcoding (using Mcoder), PMS quits after a few seconds. Anyone got any ideas on that?

[aidanjt]

It's probably a PMS bug. Why don't you just use mediatomb? Search for it with your package manager.

[burn-e86]

Found that I was not deploying it correctly and decided to follow this guide:
http://www.infobarrel.com/HOWTO:_PS3...0_karmic_koala
it turns out it was a problem with mcoder rather than with psm. Now the only problem is that my crappy ass network doesnt like to stream HD even though its at 54Mb. I'm pretty sure it's because of 02's wireless Box II. Changed the cron job to use the start-pms.sh created in the guide.

I tried using mediatomb but it was a pain in the back side trying to get it to work with mkv's and it didn't my setup at the time.