Yesterday Masterchief went down, and didn’t come back up, after hooking up a monitor and keyboard it is now displaying an error stating “No root device /dev/md1 found” and dropping me into the Dracut rescue shell.

I ran through some basic checks, fsck’ed the device, checked the RAID status and even successfully mounted it. So I’m now at quite the loss what’s causing this and so far #fedora hasn’t offered any help.

I’ll continue trying trying things, perhaps I can at least get it to boot and go from there.

Update 18-Jul-2012 (15:55): One of the errors seems related to the renaming of one of the LVM volume groups, will try changing it back to the old name, see if that works.
Update 18-Jul-2012 (19:41): Renaming the LVM volume group to its former name caused the server to boot again, now to figure out how to properly rename it and keep boot working.
Update 23-Jul-2012 (17:38): It’s odd that the root device is getting an error on a volume group rename, because the root volume is just a raw partition, guess we’ll poke some more.
Update 23-Jul-2012 (18:34): Not going to investigate further, renaming the LVM volume group to the original fixes it but I was going to install Arch Linux anyway.

I recently switched back to VLC from MPD/MPC because VLC seems to play more formats and is easier to use/set-up. However I did want to keep my global keybindings, considering I couldn’t find an option in VLC to enable them and knowing that it has a D-Bus interface I decided to figure out how it works.

After some research I found out that VLC adheres to the “Media Player Remote Interfacing Specification” (or MPRIS for short) for its D-BUS commands, which can be found here. To use it you can use the command line utility to send D-Bus messages dbus-send for example:

dbus-send --print-reply --session --dest=org.mpris.MediaPlayer2.vlc /org/mpris/MediaPlayer2 org.mpris.MediaPlayer2.Player.Stop

Which returns.

method return sender=:1.50 -> dest=:1.143 reply_serial=2

And stops the audio output.

The spec lists all the available commands however as I’ll only be using the org.mpris.MediaPlayer2.Player.* commands I made a simple wrapper script:

#!/bin/sh

# Simple proxy script to interface with VLC over DBUS
# Available commands can be found at http://specifications.freedesktop.org/mpris-spec/latest/Player_Node.html

dbus-send --print-reply --session --dest=org.mpris.MediaPlayer2.vlc /org/mpris/MediaPlayer2 org.mpris.MediaPlayer2.Player.$1

Now I can simply call vlc-proxy <command> to control VLC.

References:

• Media Player Remote Interfacing Specification (http://specifications.freedesktop.org/mpris-spec/latest/index.html)