Doug, don't feel too sheepish about the volume control thing. I spent about five hours last night in the following way:
After reviewing all 4000 mp3 files, altering tags as needed and renaming files to a common standard, I felt it was time to fire up emplode and think about reloading the files on the player, rebuilding the soup playlists, etc.
Oddly, emplode could not find the player. I tried jemplode with similar results. I disconnected the ethernet cable a few times, saw that the little blue light came on when reattached. Huh. Took a look at "Info" and saw that the IP address was 169.254.71.192. I powered off the empeg to refresh it's DHCP assigned address, but the address remained the same. I rebooted my laptop, and it functioned normally -- got a DHCP assigned address and had internet access, the works.
There is no provision to change the address manually on the player, so I fired up the SUSE Linux machine (with the serial port connected via null modem cable to the empeg). From minicom (a serial console application similar to old Windows' Terminal program) I did a CTRL-C and caused the player to hiccup, and got a message:
Player received SIGINT, user interuption
Switching to shell-player loop
Starting bash.
no shell!
Shell exit
I searched the troubleshooting forum and found that my problem was that my kernel was a consumer version, not the developer version. The consumer version doesn't provide a shell, the developer one does.
Sigh. So, I located the 2.00 developer kernel for the MK II player, ran empegUpgrade.exe through Wine (a windows emulator for Linux) and flashed the player with the new kernel. The player rebooted and as expected, Hijack was no longer there. Something else to fix.
For now though, I stayed on task and went back to minicom and did a CTRL-C and the player halted and went into a shell. Yay! I looked around and couldn't find the "config.ini" anywhere. I searched the forums and found that it lives in "/empeg/var" and sure enough there it was. I looked at the file and saw the field for IP address and also "DHCP=1". Setting DHCP to 0 would be a good start, I thought. I looked for something to edit the file with (vi, ed) and struck out. Sed is there though, so I did a
cat config.ini | sed 's|DHCP=1|DHCP=0|1'
The resulting output looked like the change was being made correctly, so I redirected the output to a temp file (before replacing the actual config.ini) and was told something like "Error writing file, readonly file system".
Jeez. (Shaking head) What's it take, anyway?
So, rather than try to remember how to remount the file system as read/write (I sensed that things would really start getting balled up) I thought that maybe I could put my laptop on the same subnet as the player and access it that way. I grabbed an old Belkin four port switch / wireless router and connected the empeg and the laptop to it, via ethernet cables. From the laptop I brought up the admin interface on the Belkin at 192.168.1.1, logged in (I remembered the password, yay!), and went to the LAN settings panel. I set it's address to 169.254.71.1 and hit save. Quite correctly, it told me no, please use non-routeable address space. Gah!
It was about this time that I went back over to the empeg and looked at the IP address on the About menu. It was 192.168.1.17. What the hell?
It dawned on me that I had never actually looked at the switch that the empeg normally connects to. It's an old Linksys... Instead of the usual display of blinking LEDs corresponding to cables connected to it, one light was on solidly. I powered it down, and powered it back up, it looked fine. I reconnected the empeg to it, and everything worked fine. The reason that the laptop worked is that it skips that switch and connects wirelessly to our router.
So, all I ever had to do in the first place was turn the Linksys off then back on.
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