UPnP media

If you want a complete newbie how-to on making a spare linux box your mediaserver, this link may be helpful.

I, on the other hand, am utilizing Slackware Linux ("The Swiss army knife of Linux") to suit my serving needs. I won't touch Ubuntu with a ten-foot pole, mostly because they focus on bleeding edge technology, which doesn't necessarily mean "stable".

And, I use "FUPPES" (Free UPnP Entertainment Service) instead of mediatomb. In my opinion, FUPPES is better equipped to transcode untraditional coded video- and music-formats. And when I tried to use mediatomb, I had trouble recognizing the service on my PlayStation3, no matter how much I tweaked the config.

To put it quite simple, I compiled FUPPES with only traditional Slackware stock-packages and libraries (where mediatomb demanded I compile a plethora of non-standard Slack-packs), added the device-IPs to the whitelist of FUPPES and opened FUPPES-designated ports to my local LAN subnet.

Thus, limiting access to the service from anything other than my internal LAN hosts.

Things FUPPES does that mediatomb does not (or at least not on my Slackware-machines anyway):

• Converts untraditional coded video to standard-formats
• Plays DivX and XviD off-the-bat without hassles what-so-ever
• Plays almost ALL audio-formats with standard libs
• Displays every image-format I have on-disk

Linux servers

Well, it finally happened. My long-time friend "slamd", the experimental Linux server box, has died.

( The picture shows the pub-machine 'slackr' )

I got it from my brother about 4-5 years ago, when it had been obsolete for almost 2 years already. It was not a custom power-house, nor was it bleeding edge technology.., it was MINE. And it did what I had in mind for it, and it did it pretty damn well too I must add.

It was a scruffy AMD Athlon XP 2500+, running on a special legacy ATX-board made by 'ABit' --not the most stable hardware I've ever used--, with 2GB Corsair DDR RAM, a GeForce 6600 GT GFX card, some USB 2.0 extension cards and a Creative Audigy 2 ZX 7.1 digital surround soundcard.

I used the box as:

• a house-central secondary NAT router
• an UPnP multimedia server
• a network fileserver
• a central database server (for hosting web-content served by my public-machine)

Lately, the motherboard just wouldn't boot up properly. My suspicions fall on the rather dusty CPU-chip I had put in it, but for all I know, the motherboard has met it's end of days...

So, I had to disconnect my public-machine (a dusty, dirt-old Pentium III 800MHz box), throw out 'slamd', put in the public-machine as a temporary replacement and route all the public requests in to my private internal LAN where the pub-machine acts in it's own DMZ.

Then I had to re-compile my UPnP mediaserver software because 'slamd' had it's software repository stored on one of it's internal IDE harddrives, and I just couldn't be bothered about doing backup-jobs and the like... so, I went with 'K.I.S.S.' like I usually do ;P