New Member, First Time Poster

[djfourmoney]

I'm currently unemployed, studying A+ but my instructor is very advanced so we're also getting Networking as well. Anyway, I have thought more and more about centralizing my media for not only my Windows Media Center PC, but to also backup my mother's PC and my laptop.

What I am interested in doing is -

[*]Monitor and Automatically send Recorded TV files to the server
[*]Automatically Wake On LAN My Mom's PC for Backup
[*]Monitor and Automatically send files from other programs such as Replay A/V

And of course the usual stuff like backup my PC and store all my tv shows, movies and music.

As of now I am the only one will be using it to stream content back to my Media Center PC. In the future maybe run MediaTomb and connect it to my Father's DirecTV DVR (HR-22).

Building a server using Ubuntu sounds like a great idea and your guide is more than helpful and would save me the $119US that Windows Home Server 2011 cost.

I want to run it headless as well and really like Mint 10/11 as a desktop as its most "Windows" like to me.

Is it possible to do some of the things I outlined?

Also RAID setups just seem problematic and I sort of like MS' JBOD setup for home server were it sees it as one large drive and gives it a single drive letter.

I'm trying to keep the price of components down and might opt for a Atom based mini-ITX bases system since I won't be transcoding yet and likely when I am fully employed again will build a AMD Zacated based WHS later which is low power and handles transcoding with ease. But I want to learn how to admin on a Linux based machine as well.

It might be just one 2TB (new), 640GB (in-use) and I might re-purpose my Buffalo external HDD's (250GB and 500GB) giving me a total space of roughly 3.1TB or so.

I have to find a case to hold two drives that's min-ITX and I think I found one. Atom MB+Case+Memory (DDR3) comes to about $170 shipped. I will be picking up a 2TB ($70) Hard Drive so I can back up all my other drives to that and rebuild my HTPC OS drive. So total investment would be about $240 which is not bad for a server IMHO.

Thanks for the guide and any help/suggestions you can offer...

[Ian]

Hi djfourmoney and welcome to the forum

Good luck with your studies, once you’ve some experience under your belt actually building a media server then hopefully some of the subjects you cover in your coursework will be second nature to you.

The aims for your server sound possible although you need to clarify a couple of things before I can give you a concrete answer:

[*]Monitor and Automatically send Recorded TV files to the server

What does this mean exactly? You can obviously use your server to record TV Shows (assuming you install a tuner card) but what do you mean by “send”? Do you wish to send the physical recordings from some other device on your network? If so, which one? Or do you mean something else?

[*]Automatically Wake On LAN My Mom's PC for Backup

Yes you can do that although I tend to do it the other way round (ie. I back up my desktops from my desktops, as opposed to from my server). Have a look at SyncBack Freeware. Also take a look at BackupPC and Bacula although I’ve only used SyncBack but the latter two may suit your needs better.

[*]Monitor and Automatically send files from other programs such as Replay A/V

I’ve zero experience using Replay A/V, sorry.

I’m afraid I’ve never used Mint either. I tend to use the bog-standard Ubuntu desktop. It’s really quite Windows-like although I rarely use it now. I now tend to do everything using Webmin and only occasionally fire up the desktop itself.

RAID setups CAN be problematic. I went without any sort of RAID for a long time until I finally came across FlexRAID. It really suited me down to the ground since I could simply install it onto my existing setup without wiping my drives first. I’ve got everything hanging off the one “entry point” which I achieved using symlinks. You could look at using something like mhddfs to “join” multiple volumes together.

An Atom-based setup will be perfectly adequate for streaming video and backing up your desktops. No problems at all.

Good luck with your build sir and keep us posted. And good luck with your studies

Ian.

[djfourmoney]

To Clarify...

I use Windows 7 Media Center to record Live TV. I wanted the server to monitor the Recorded TV folder and automatically move those files from my local drive to the server. I guess what I am saying is that I would like the server to fetch files from my Recorded TV folder once it detects a file in there. I am planning to rebuild my OS so I will return to having my HTPC auto-detect adverts and delete them from my recorded shows.

With Replay A/V its basically Media Center for streaming content. I wanted to automatically move the files that are recorded by this program to the server as well.

I've used both Ubuntu and Mint but not extensively. I've started to explore them more in class and like the look and feel of Mint 10/11 over Ubuntu ATM. I used Ubuntu to recover data on my laptop when it crashed badly, so I'm fairly familiar with it.

I have built several PC's, so I don't see anything special about building a server other than what software it runs as I haven't extensively run Linux based software for long periods of time.

Thanks about my studies, I didn't find A+ hard at all. Its mostly the techno-babble that's on the A+ test that would prevent me from passing it without taking this class. I'm also learning quit a bit about servers and because I'm taking the 9 week course for a second time, I think when we get to networking in the next few days, I'll go ahead and install Ubuntu Server and all the other software you outlined in the guide on one of our old Dell machines for a test run.

[Ian]

Thanks for the clarification.

I guess you could use something like rsync to copy your recordings across from your HTPC to your server. You'd probably have to do something clever to not copy recordings that are still in progress else you'd be copying incomplete files. I've not tried doing this myself so can't offer any tips but I'm sure someone out there has done this sort of thing already. Or maybe one of the pre-built backup tools will be your answer?

Ian.

[djfourmoney]

Updating...

I found a server case that's does about 90% of what I want and that's-

[*]Be affordable ($70)
[*]Small (Mini-ITX)
[*]Hold More Than Two Drives

Its made my Morex



Still searching for places that sell it, I have found one thus far. I holds three drives total, so it would be one drive down from other cares I have looked at but it holds one more drive than another hot swappable mini-itx server case. The big thing is that is looks decent and cost less than the competitors.

In other news, it looks like prices for 2TB 3.5 drives are hovering between $60 after rebate to $80-90US nominally. I've been trying to pick up a drive to start this project but every couple of days the prices moves around. First it was the Samsamg F4 2TB for $70 with promo code. Then Amazon matched it without the code and only two days ago then prices return to normal on both sites.

I will get a drive in the next 4-5 day however.

There some others things in-front of me so my own personal server will likely won't be build until a month from now. I will however build one using your guide, a old Dell Pent 4 and a few smallish drives, likely only two because we only have IDE supported motherboards. Might add a external (250GB) or two though. Its only going to be up and running for a few weeks tops, class ends June 24th.