So, my last server has now been converted over to Ubuntu. I wasn’t originally planning to convert this server but I thought it was kind of strange to have one Windows box still sitting around.
This machine was actually sitting in my living room and was connected to the TV because it had an HDMI output on it. I kept all my media files on it. I wasn’t actually using anything other than BSPlayer to play the stuff though.
But I started thinking one night, that I already had the WDTV Live and I should be using that for playing my media. The one problem with that though was it actually sucks for network content. Always drops the connection to the server before finishing your show!
But knowing there are some Linux kernels made for it that greatly increase its usefulness, I thought I could try that route. I’d convert the Windows box to Ubuntu and host all the media from there.
The first step was to backup all the content though since I was planning on reformatting all the drives. So, that took about a week to sort through. In the process, I found one drive had actually started failing back on March 8th, so there went that content :(.
So, Ubuntu is installed, drives are all formatted with ext3, network is up, and Samba and NFS are configured. Working very nice!
NFS
I really like NFS. It’s not the greatest network filesystem, but it does make UNIX boxes connect well. I made sure every partition on each machine was mounted to a unique directory. So, machine A had mount points “ad, ae, af, ag”. Machine B had “bd be bf bg”. Basically, the hostname + a letter starting from “d”. I really don’t know why I started at “d” other than I was mimicking my Windows setup on my workstation.
Then, I used NFS to cross mount all the drives from each server onto each other server. So now, it doesn’t matter what PC I’m connected to, I can access the mounted partitions on every other server. This works great for ISO images for building VMWare guests.
Media
Having 20 NFS shares isnt very fun for Windows though. I still need to see all the media files in one simple place. So, that’s where Samba comes in. I created a single directory called /data and used symbolic links to point my Movies, Music, Software, and Tv folders to their actual locations.
In fact, the Tv folder is managed by a special perl script. It dynamically looks at every mounted file system and if it finds a directory called “Tv”, it enters it and creates symbolic links in the /data/Tv folder for each one. It also cleans them out if the source path is no longer available.
Since I have a lot of media on portable NTFS drives, I can just plug them in, mount them, and they will automatically appear in the Tv folder. I can then access that from my Windows PC, or the WDTV box.
WDTV still not the nicest. XBOX + XBMC Rule!
I started thinking that I still have my old XBOX with XBMC installed on it sitting in the basement. I decided to bring it up and hook it up to the receiver. It doesn’t have HDMI, but my receiver will up convert the component video to the HDMI signal for my TV.
I had that setup within minutes and had it accessing the Tv and Movies folders from the server. I forgot how nice XBMC is to work with. Very nice screens even without adding new themes! And playback of my content is a lot nicer that what the WDTV provides. The remote is more usable, and navigation is faster.
The one great feature of XBMC is that it uses mplayer under the covers and the remote gives me 30 second and 10 minute skips. Great for restarting a show half way in!
XBMC also has a very configurable zoom capability so I can make every show fit better on the TV.
Summing Up
To finish up, I got to get this server down to the basement with the others. But that’s going to be some work since I have to move them around a bit as well.
After that, I can finally move all the other junk back to the basement. I’ve been doing some early spring cleaning this year to get rid of all the old computers and electronics junk.