Forum.HaveTheKnowHow.com

Hey Everyone,

I stumbled upon Ian's design for a media server sometime last year and knew instantly that I wanted to build a home network

Here is what I'm proposing to do. Let me know what you think.

Firewall/Router:
Old AMD Athlon running PfSense. The parts are so old that I can't remember what's in the case anymore. I did add 3 TrendNet Gigabit NICs for WAN, LAN, and WLAN. I will add 3 more NICs for the media server and eventually two media streamers.

Main PC:
I just purchased the parts for a brand new Ivy Bridge build.
- Intel 3570K Ivy Bridge Processor
- Corsair Carbide 400R Case
- ASUS P8Z77-V LK LGA Motherboard
- SeaSonic M12II 620W Power Supply
- ASUS DVD Burner (I don't have anything capable of HD playback at the moment so I opted not to get a BluRay burner yet)
- 150 GB Seagate and 600 GB Western Digital HDDs will be recycled from my current PC
- 8GB Crucial Ballistix 1866 RAM
- MSI N560GTX-Ti Twin Frozr II from my current PC

Media Server:
With the exception of the NIC, HDDs, and video card, everything comes from my current PC.
- Intel Q8300 Processor
- Antec 300 Case
- Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3L Motherboard
- Corsair 450W Power Supply
- 4GB G.Skill RAM
- Lite-On DVD Burner
- 2x 1TB Western Digital Green HDDs
- 8800GT Video Card
- Intel Gigabit NIC

Media Streamer #1
This will be an 6 year old ASUS Z796j laptop that has a broken screen but works fine otherwise. This is a temporary solution. One day I would like to build a low power, compact streamer with HD and gigabit capabilities. I don't have any existing equipment that was designed to be a streamer. I could buy one but I haven't found one that I like that will run XBMC.

Media Streamer #2
I would like to have a second one for the bedroom but I'm not sure if that's going to happen. I have an old HP Pavillion 8580C but it's in rough shape.

All of my TVs are old so I will have to use s-video cables for video and component cables for audio until I get a modern TV The network will be built on cat5.


I know very, very little about all of this. I've built several PC but never a real network for them. Let me know if any of the following is just completely wrong or if you have any suggestions for me.

1. I really like the interface on XBMC so would like to use that as the front end. If I only have that loaded on Media Streamer #1 and my main PC, is that good enough to watch videos from the media server?

2. I would like the media server to be headless like the one Ian built. Do I need to connect it to a monitor for the initial set up or can that be done through the network using my main PC?

3. My main PC and Media Streamer #1 run Windows 7 and Windows XP, respectively. I would like to run Ubuntu on the media server, will this be a problem?

4. I started loading movies on one of the HDDs already. Will I have to redo this since the loading was done using Win 7 while the media server will be on Ubuntu?

5. Should I keep XP on Media Streamer #1 or change to another operating system? If so, which system?

6. Does any of this even seem viable?

Sorry if this post is a bit rambly.

Hello and welcome.

That sounds like quite a setup

I will do my best to answer your questions.

1.& 5. There is XBMC-Live that is the main that simply boot's into XBMC and thats all you get so you could replace XP with it, if all you want is to use the PC as a media streamer.

2. You need to connect a monitor and keyboard for the initial installation and configuration as per Ian's guide.

3. I have no problems connecting to my Ubuntu server from various different operating systems including: Win 7, XP, Debian (Raspberry Pi) and Mac OSX.

4. Yes as Ubuntu uses a a different filesystem for it's drives-ext4, where as Windows mainly uses NTFS an FAT32 for such as USB flash drives.

5. Answered in answer 1.

6. Yes.

You don't really need a gigabit link for your streamers as HD streaming only uses about 50Mbps and a fast ethernet supports 100Mbps over a maximum length of 100 metre's-90 metres to be on the safe side, minus some overhead for network protocols and such like.

Hopefully this will shed some light on what you are trying to achieve.

Please let us know how you get on, I am particularly interested in pfSense for your router as I am pondering pfSense for my "homebrew" router, although I am tempted to go down the M0n0wall router as I don't really need an enterprise class router for my home network.

Andy

Hey Andy,

Thanks for the reply and for taking the time to answer my questions I do have a better idea on what I'm doing with this now. I'm glad to hear that this set up isn't out of the question.

I had also looked at M0n0wall as a solution but so many of the tutorials and videos I found were for Pfsense so I went with that. Here is one that I used specifically for my firewall:

http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/security/security-howto/31406-build-your-own-ids-firewall-with-pfsense

Installation wasn't bad but there are so many options available that configuration can be a bit confusing. I foresee that getting all of the equipment to talk to each other through Pfsense will be an adventure.

I'll try to keep this thread updated with my progress.

Jon

Please let us know how you get on with pfSense.

Andy

Well, I haven't made much progress yet. I received the parts about 2 weeks ago but the new case was dented pretty bad so I RMA'd it with Newegg. Hopefully, they will send the replacement soon.

I did run into some issues with the PfSense box and my wireless router. Things had been fine for months and then all of the sudden the route started to reset itself to the factory defaults randomly. I thought the router was the problem but once I disconnected it from the firewall, things worked as they should. The router was sitting on top of the firewall so I'm thinking that maybe it was overheating and causing the random errors. I'm not sure, though.

Have you turned off DHCP on your router, if you have two DHCP servers running on the same network it will cause issue's.

Andy

Impressive specs but a bit of overkill I think. I would recommend you use staticIP addressing throughout,

I think wiht the hardware you could build a system similar to what I'm building as a whole house/web media server. Take advantage of the processing power you have to to drive some devices derectlly and your workstation somewhere wlse. Otherwiswe if I had the cash I'd doo something similar.

Don't forget to look for net conflicts when yu wire it up.

For speed internally I would hardwire the entire network That takes the wireless load off the router for other comptuers to use. Wireless could also wor against you i this config. Too many users on the network can slow you down. Better to remain hardwired.