The Linux Alternative Project

Subsonic not binding to IPv4 port in Ubuntu

Posted on: 2011-03-20

I’ve recently started using Subsonic as my music player. With it, I have streaming access to all my music via a browser or an Android application. It’s great, I love it!

About a week ago I updated Java on my system and it broke my Subsonic install. It would work locally but not remotely.

After some troubleshooting, I noticed that it was binding to the IPv6 port but not IPv4.

I dug around Google and finally found this.

Apparently, Java 1.6 favours IPv6 by default and will not use IPv4 unless you explicitly tell it to.

The fix is to edit your /usr/share/subsonic/subsonic.sh file and add the follow argument to the Java call to start Subsonic.

  -Djava.net.preferIPv4Stack=true

The Java call should look something like this:

${JAVA} -Xmx${SUBSONIC_MAX_MEMORY}m \
  -Dsubsonic.home=${SUBSONIC_HOME} \
  -Dsubsonic.host=${SUBSONIC_HOST} \
  -Dsubsonic.port=${SUBSONIC_PORT} \
  -Dsubsonic.httpsPort=${SUBSONIC_HTTPS_PORT} \
  -Dsubsonic.contextPath=${SUBSONIC_CONTEXT_PATH} \
  -Dsubsonic.defaultMusicFolder=${SUBSONIC_DEFAULT_MUSIC_FOLDER} \
  -Dsubsonic.defaultPodcastFolder=${SUBSONIC_DEFAULT_PODCAST_FOLDER} \
  -Dsubsonic.defaultPlaylistFolder=${SUBSONIC_DEFAULT_PLAYLIST_FOLDER} \
  -Djava.awt.headless=true \
  -Djava.net.preferIPv4Stack=true \
  -jar subsonic-booter-jar-with-dependencies.jar > ${LOG} 2>&1 &

I’m sure this will be fixed in future versions. Hopefully this will help somebody else out.