The Littlest Server

I have eight computers in my house.  The wife and I each have a “main” machine, identical Dell XPS machines we bought a few years back.  We have a Media PC where we download and watch TV shows (it has 6 analog tuners, which was awesome until Comcast ditched analog and the PC can’t handle 6 digital tuners, but it makes a good media server).  There is a PC in the bedroom (when the last DVD player died we just moved an old PC in there to watch stuff on – bonus, it lets us watch Netflix Instant in bed).  There is an iMac, which barely gets any use at all, but we sometimes drop it in a room that we want to stream music to.  I have a netbook and the wife uses my old laptop for portable computing around the house and out of the house.  And lastly my wife’s old laptop that she lugged to England while she went to university over there about 8 years ago.

As someone who does web development for a living, one thing I’ve always lacked at home was a server.  Sure, I’ve installed the dev environments on my main machine to be able to test things out, but I’ve never had a server that worked like a real server.  Monday I decided to rectify that.  Not wanting to buy a new machine I had to repurpose an existing one.  Obviously, the main machines were out, as was the Media PC, the bedroom PC, the netbook and the laptop the wife uses.  So my options were the iMac or the decade old HP laptop.  The iMac still serves a purpose, and not just as the occasional music streamer, but from a web development standpoint I sometimes use it to see what sites I build look like under other browsers.  I might still turn it into a server one day, for now though I went with the HP laptop.

The HP Pavilion n5150 latop.  This beast had Windows ME installed on it.  Yes, I said Windows ME.  This, above all other reasons, was why it was chosen for the server.  Plus, I like the idea of being able to put the server on a shelf out of the way where it doesn’t take up much space.  My current webhost (Dreamhost, who I am very happy with) uses Debian OS based servers.  As such, I decided that Debian would be my choice as well.  I downloaded the network install ISO, burned a disc, put it in the laptop and booted up.  It took about 2 hours, maybe 3, to finish (the network install puts the base OS on and then downloads everything else).  Clearly, the PIII-600MHz processor, the 256MB RAM and 10GB HD are woefully below the specs of a PC you’d actually want to use these days, but as a little web server it chugs along just fine.  Then I put MySQL and a few other bits on it and it is ready.

I am excited as I move into the next phases of my own little side projects, both the business app that will make me rich and the zombie web games that I’ve always wanted to build.

Goodbye VCRs, Hello Medusa!

Sometimes I really hate the Television Networks. They seem to insist of fighting head to head instead of spreading out all over the week. Every fall season, its inevitable that of the roughly fifteen hours of TV I want to watch it all airs in the real space of about 4 or 5 hours, meaning that quite often two, three, or even four shows are on at once. Seeing as how I pretty much hate having commercials interrupt my TV shows, I tape everything and watch it later to allow fast forwarding, which also allows me to make plans any night of the week because I’m always taping anyway. One of my VCRs decided to start dying on me… crinkling tapes causing me to miss shows when they didn’t record, and its tuner started making things fuzzy… so I went looking to buy a new VCR. No one really makes VCRs much anymore, and what I really wanted was a dual tuner device so I could finally pick up that fourth show some nights (I only had three VCRs)… they don’t make those. Even these new devices with a VCR and a DVR in them only have one tuner (you can’t record on both the VCR and the DVR from two different channels at once). After a long search, I finally just gave up and started looking for a complete alternative.

I thought about going with a Windows XP Media Center Edition based PC since I know a couple of people that have them and love them, but the price seemed to be a bit much, and it only legitimately supports two tuners. Of course, you can hack it to handle as many as you want, but reports are pretty consistant that Microsoft programmed their usual bloat and once you get the 4th or 5th simultaneous recording going it pegs the processor (which shouldn’t happen, since any decent TV tuner card actually has its on encoding processor on it and doesn’t use the CPU at all) and starts chugging, causing any number of problems, unless you spend a huge amount of money on a monster machine that can handle all that. Pricey. Then I stumbled on Medusa.

Well, really its SnapSteam Media’s software, but they titled this particular setup of 6 tuner joy after the fabled gorgon killed by Perseus. I followed their recommendations, built a $500 PC (could have been cheaper, but I wanted a special case that looked like a media component and not a PC) with the exception of a 320GB drive instead of a 40 (a nice 130 hours of storage on the “Better” quality setting), and SATA-150 instead of ATA-100; and bought the Medusa pack with the 3 dual tuner cards instead of 6 single tuners. And yesterday I successfully recorded 6 programs at once. Now, with the SnapStream Beyond TV software set up to record all new episodes of all my favorite shows, I’ll never need to set a timer again.

So, like the title says… Goodbye VCRs, goodbye video tapes, goodbye setting timers on multiple units and watching TV schedules like a hawk for unexpected changes, and goodbye pain in my ass… Hello 21st Century, and hello Medusa!