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I have a an old desktop sat upstairs doing very little since work provided me with a laptop.
Since it is primarily a work laptop I don't really want to store all my music and video on it, but it's much more convenient to use than booting up the old faithful every time I want to sync my Ipod, stream media to the TV etc.
So, I'm thinking of setting it up as a server for all the various devices around the house to have access to.
Good idea or are there any potential pitfalls I'm not thinking of?
Would Ubuntu be the best way forward for this?
's exactly what I did, only I left it running XP.
I was using TVersity to stream to the Xbox, but I've since got a Sony Bluray player and there's an app called Serviio which the BD player supports natively, so I use that now. There may be better solutions, but that works for what I want it for.
It also drives the printer, manages downloads and suchlike.
An old PC can use quite a bit of power... How about one of these:
[url= http://singletrackworld.com/forum/topic/nas-q ]From this thread..[/url]
Currently using the Xbox and windows media server to stream to my Bravia, but have used TVersity and PSMedia to cut out the middle man in the past.
Would be open to trying out alternatives depending what's works well on Ubuntu if I go down that route. Will probably have to play around and find what works best in our setup.
How much is this likely to affect any electricity bills given that it'll be running 24/7, will it be drawing much when it'll be sitting idle?
Are there any advantages to running Ubuntu over XP in terms of power consumption, options to schedule shutting down the server overnight?
e2a : Cheers Milkie, will check that out.
Ubuntu would be a fun way to use it, but depending on experience maybe not the quickest or easiest. It's not hard now, but might be slightly pointless other than for the hell of it.
I'm using a Hackintosh for the same sort of job (and as the family desktop) but it required a fair bit of careful component selection so you'd be extremely lucky if you could get OS X on it.
I hear good things about Windows Home Server too. Not tried it myself, and I expect you could replicate most functions on XP as long as you've less than 10 concurrent connections.
Milkie, that looks pretty tempting. Have you got one?
I notice that price is for an unpopulated model, I'm assuming I can just shove my 250GB Sata in there?
Haze,
See [url= http://singletrackworld.com/forum/topic/nas-q ]this STW thread[/url] which is about that NAS. As far as I know, yes you can just shove your SATA drive in. 😉
I don't have one of those, but I do have a NAS, and it will do everything you need it to, probably a lot quieter and less power than a PC too.