Very Random iTunes Sharing Notes
I’m looking for a way to share our large collection of music files on the home file server with our laptops on the wireless network. Basic requirements are as follows:
- As simple to use as possible, preferably no user intervention needed once it is set up.
- Secure; I don’t want anyone close to our house to be able to get at the music. So it needs to be password protected, but not necessarily encrypted on the wire. The password, however, should offer a modicum of security.
I thought that maybe WebDAV would offer a good solution, so I’ve been tinkering around with that tonight, serving from mod_dav + Apache on the FreeBSD server to my OSX 10.3 laptop. Random things I’ve noticed:
- mod_dav files are stored as regular files, so it’s theoretically possible to share with other access methods. The file locking issues are supposed to be a problem though. At least for sharing read-only data, it works out of the box.
- OSX’s built-in DAV client doesn’t support SSL encryption, but it does support Digest authentication, and contrary to popular rumor the password can be stored in the keychain for automatic remounting.
- iTunes can index files on a DAV volume just fine, and it will even automatically remount the needed volume to play a song. Even works with stored passwords.
So after some fiddling, I think this might be the solution I’m looking for. It’ll require maintenance of another password file, but it will work for now. Hopefully Apple will add SSL support to their WebDAVFS client soon.
One problem is going to be that if new files are added to the archive there’s no way to automatically add it to the remote iTunes Library. I wonder if the iTunes sharing options do this automatically (I’ll have to try it between laptops).
