PlexAmp headless with read only FS for safe power off

Plex Labs
1

Hi there,
In about to dive into Plexamp Headless (just waiting for my JustBoom Digi Zero to arrive), and was wondering: as this is effectively a hi-fi component now, I’d like to be able to cut its power without having to issue a shutdown command.
For example: I currently use Squeezeboxes for my music streaming, and have a few “PiCorePlayer” instances running on Raspberry Pis that have read only filesystems. These can therefore have their power cut without risk of corrupting the SD card. Further, when you use the UI to change a setting, it will write it to disk, then go back to read only, enabling the user to have those new settings persist across a reboot.
I know it’s possible to set Raspberry OS to be read only (Overview | Read-Only Raspberry Pi | Adafruit Learning System) so was wondering:

A) is it possible, once I’ve setup PlexAmp, to set my FS to read only (assuming I don’t change any settings in PlexAmp without first reverting it), or does PlexAmp require writing to disk during normal operation? and

B) is there anything I can change to make it work (eg set a tmp directory to a USB drive)? and

C) are there any plans to make the headless version more “appliance” like and have it support read only FS and “no shutdown” power cuts?
Many thanks for your info!

2

With the small power consumption of a Pi, worth it?

A) yes (cache, settings)
B) you could make some symlinks, presumably
C) not currently; focus is on high-level functionality

1 Like
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Thanks for the reply.
It’s more that I don’t want to have to SSH into it whenever I need to kill its power.
I’ll have a go at using symlinks, otherwise I’ll deal with SSH shutdowns.
And again: thanks for PlexAmp, and thanks for the headless version. I’m really excited to see it develop further.

4

glad you’re enjoying it. it’s gonna form the basis of my whole home audio system so you can believe we care about making it work well :sweat_smile:

1 Like
5

if you want to make it at least kinda quick, you could make an alias in your shell of whatever device you would use to ssh in that looks something like this:

alias shutpi=“ssh me@mypihostname sudo shutdown -h now”

(you’d have to have your “me” account on the pi set up for passwordless sudo)

then you just get in your terminal app and type shutpi.

If you want to get real fancy, you could program that into a button on a mobile device.

1 Like
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