Storage overkill. How many gigs you got?

[mithrilG60]

Originally Posted by Cyclone

Hey Geoff,

What are you using for your media server?

Save me a trip to Google: what is LMV?

Hey Rudy,

My media server is actually an old HP desktop that would have been TRP'ed and thrown in the garbage put in a new case with a new power supply I added some drives, loaded Debian 5 (ie. lenny) onto it, installed nfs/samba/lvm, made a big lun, configured sharing and called it a day. I use a Popcorn Hour A-100, which is Linux or FreeBSD based, to stream the video over a wireless-N bridge to my theatre setup so I don't need anything particularly fancy in terms of server software. I've also heard that Windows Home Server (based off W2K3 Standard) works very well for aggregating drives into large storage volumes, plus it'll manage automated backups for up to 10 workstations including wake-on-lan so that might be worth looking at too.

LVM stands for Logical Volume Manager, it's basically JBOD at the software level in instead of in the BIOS or on an onboard sata raid controller. Obviously no redundancy or parity, but for saved video I don't really care..... family video is stored on the fileserver, the media server is just for TV and movies. LVM is amazingly easy to setup, I can fire you some HOWTO's if you want. I don't even bother making backups of the server's OS itself (just the NFS and Samba conf files) since it's just a vanilla install of Debian with a couple packages added. The Lenny netinst disc will even detect existing LVM instances during a fresh install and auto-mount them for you so recovery is a snap.