My Technology Blog

I have been looking for a good solution for a home media server for some time now, and I have just not been able to find it. The best solution that i could find was a MAC mini, with an external capture adapter like Hauppauge, but it just seemed to defeat the purpose since I would have all of this junk near the T.V. I also want a large amount of storage with RAID, which I also could not get easily with the MAC Mini today. I am not posting this to knock the mini, since it does seem to be one of the better solutions today, and all of the other off the shelf solutions are even more narrowly focused (and limited).

Instead of trying to work with all of the limitations of the existing “media server” solutions, I decided to go back to the drawing board and focus on what I needed first. I thought that by doing this, I could create a check list for everything that I needed, and make it easier to find what I really wanted. After going through this exercise, I came up with the following requirements (not in any particular order):

• Lots of storage for digital photos, music, and video.
• RAID5, since I will also use the storage to back up all of the other home computers.
• A direct connection to my home theater.
• 1G wired Ethernet connection.
• Lots of processing power.
• Lots of software included.
• Easy access to the server from any other computer on the network.
• Network security.
• Web based filing system to make it easy to amount a large amount of content.

After looking at the system from the top down, it quickly became apparent that any decent consumer solutions will be several generations away, and if any solutions does exist today, it would be very very expensive. Because of this, I decided to build a Linux based PC media center from scratch, with support for everything that I have listed above. The only problem, is that it is going to be very big and ugly, so I also decided to move the server into the basement below the Living room T.V. That way I could connect it up to the home theater system easily, but not see it, or hear it. Finally, I ran Ethernet cables in the basement to create a second gigabit home network, connected with a 1G Ethernet switch, just for devices connected to the media center.

Once I realized that I could work with a standard Linux system, all of the previous limitations of off the shelf systems were gone. I now have a fairly high end system, that has lots of processing power, storage and memory. I don’t need to worry about the form factor, and there are lots of adapters available for all of the media interfaces. I also have lots of free Linux software to choose from for networking, RAID, and capturing and displaying media.

Right now it is up and running, but still pretty basic. I do have the networking set up, and I can display and capture media on my T.V. using software like VLC, and Kino. I have copied all of my home videos, music, and photos over to the server, and display them on my T.V. which makes it easy to watch old home videos without dragging out the old camcorder and connecting it up. I can also easily access all of this digital information from a Windows laptop that I have, if I am not in the living room.

I will add more details and photos once I get time, and things are more integrated. There are still tons of things that I want to do, but it is just great having a large backup server in the house, and all of my digital content in one place.

Continuing with the theme that small focused web software is better than larger CMS types of software, I decided to try out PHPBB for a small forum that I wanted to add to a mediawiki web site. The main reason that I selected PHPBB was because it seems to be the most common software being used for forums, and it fit in nicely with the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) software already running for the Mediawiki server. I had used other Forum software, such as Drupal, and Plone before, and I found PHPBB to be much cleaner, which was another big reason for selecting it. Finally, PHP is free while other packages, such as vBulletin are commercial, and only offer short trial periods.

Like most other packages these days, it installed very easily, and was easy to get up and running. I initially did not configure much, and it was pretty easy to add new forums, and topics. Unfortunately, after having the forum up for one day, it started to get hit with spam postings. I enabled e-mail authentication, which cut down on a large amount of the spam, but I still seem to get a few postings even with the captchas enabled. The amount of spam is probably due to the popularity of PHPBB, and they should really consider implementing spam controls, similar to those found in WordPress.

Another configuration setting that is a must, is to disable automatic pruning. The first few postings to the PHPBB forum started disappearing after a week or so. It turns out that the default setting, is for pruning to automatically delete posts without responses after only one week. I also installed a couple of mods to not display the memberlist, profiles, and groups, to people that are not registered. Installing the mods is usually done manually, and is not as clean as in other packages such as Drupal, Plone, and Mediawiki, but not a big deal.

Besides that it seems to be a very nice fit for a small forum.

Pros

• Free .
• Easy to Install.
• Very clean interface for forums.
• Lots of online support available.

Cons

• PHPBB seems to be a target for spam.
• Some of the default settings.
• Mods and extensions typically require modifying the code, and are very version specific.