[Project Log] Funkstars Digital Lifestyle

[Funkstar]

Overview

So What's this all about then?
Well I've mentioned some parts of my home setup a few times in various threads, and people seem to be quite interested, so I thought I would put it all down in one place.

A bit OTT isn't it?
Yes, probably. But it's what I'm interested in and at the end of the day, it's something to do

(more to come)


My actual network isn't that big a deal. Draytek Vigor 2700 ADSL2+ router, Edimax EW7146APn Wireless-N Access Point and an Edimax 8-port gigabit switch. I had thought of getting a lerger 16 port switch when I moved into my current place, but it seems to be a lot friendlier with regards to wireless signal, so I only have a few things wired at the moment (server, desktop, printer, livingroom HTPC and a spare lead for laptops).

I'll do a network map and get photos online later.

• Draytek ADSL2+ router
• Edimax wireless AP
• Edimax 8-port Gigabit ethernet switch
• Brother MFC-465CN (printer, scanner, fax)
• Data, music and TV Server
• Desktop workstation, laptop and netbook
• 2x MediaPortal clients
• 4x Squeezebox players

The Network



The printer was an absolute bargain! I decided I wanted an all in one printer/scanner/copier, preferably one I could network so my laptops and my desktop could all print without messing about with USB cables. I was wondering through Tesco one day and saw this. I knew Brother dod some interesting small office units, so this caught my eye. it was an ex display model without ink, power cable, network cable, manuals or drives, basically just the unit itself as you saw it. That wasn't a problem as it takes a standard kettle lead and ethernet cable. Ink I got for about £1 per cartridge online somewhere and the drivers I downloaded. It's been fantastic. I mainly use it for scanning, and the sheet feeder is pretty good. I'm going through all my old statements and bills, and binning all the leaver arch files I've built up over the years.

That white shelf things is from Ikea and is supposed to be in kitchen cupboards to give you more space for tins and jars etc. Works well here too.

[Funkstar]

Server

Here's the heart of the set up, my home built server.

• Akasa Infinity Case
• 3x 5-in-3 hot swap SATA cages
• 1x 3-in-2 hot swap SATA cage)
• Gigabyte 780G Motherboard
• 8GB memory
• AMD AM2 Quad Core CPU
• 1TB Something as boot drive
• PERC 5/i Hardware RAID card
  - 8x 1TB Hitachi Ultrastar in RAID-5
• PERC 5/i Hardware RAID card
  - 4x 1.5TB Western Digital EADS in RAID-5
• 2x Hauppauge Nova-T 500 Dual Tuner DVB-T card

RAID

This box does a few things, but the most important part is file storage. So I have a lot of that. Too much some would say, but you can never have too much storage

I need to update the screen grabs of the volume properties as I've expanded the second RAID volume, but this gives you an idea of the amount of storage I have in here.

Volume 1 - 8x 953,869GB drives in RAID-5 giving 6.36TB of usable space (6,997,438,099,456 bytes)
Volume 2 - 8x 1,430,799GB drives in RAID-5 giving 9.xxTB of usable space ( bytes)



The LSI MegaRAID Storage Manager (v2.35-01) is a very weird piece of software. On one hand it is awesome as it lets you manage a huge number of options and RAID volumes. On the other it is a complete pain in the arse to use. The interface isn't very polished and gives little explanation of what options mean, I guess this isn't too much of a surprise as it isn't aimed as consumers at all and it would really only be server admins that should be using it.

The cards I'm using are Dell Perc 5/i SAS/SATA hardware RAID cards. I got mine off eBay last year, they were pretty common then, but the supply of affordable ones has dried up a bit now. They are often sold as basic Poweredge accessories, so just the bare card with the 256MB cache. However, to use them in a regular system you need the PCI bracket, battery backup, battery cable and two SFF-8484 cables. These cables take the two large edge connectors at the top of the card and split them off to 4 regular SATA connections.

If these were going into Dell systems, they would use straight through SFF-8484 cables to connect up the drive cages. Unfortunately the cages I'm using are 5 drives each and just have five regular SATA connectors on the back. This means I have better drive density than some other cages, but it does make cabling... interesting... to manage.



So what is a PERC 5/i?
PERC, or Power Edge Raid Controller, is actually a LSI MegaRAID SAS 8480E wuth slightly different firmware, although it can be flashed with the LSI firmware. I haven't done this, not 100% sure why people have done this but I think it is for compatibility with particular systems.

Some brief specs:
- Powerful Intel® IOP333 processor with XScale® Microarchitecture
- Support for RAID levels 0, 1, 5, 10, and 50
- 256 MB of DDR2 memory for read and write cache
- Includes battery backup designed to provide up to 72 hours of protection


DVB-T (aka Freeview) tuner


This is a complicated subject. There are a lot of cards out there, and they vary wildly in price, they also very quite considerably in performance and reliability. For something that is becoming so popular these days, it's amazing how immature some of these cards are. So many of them are plagued with driver issues. Part of the problem can be laid at Microsoft's door, the BDA driver sub system is, by all accounts, pretty terrible. There is a host of features missing or not possible because of the way it's been put together, which means manufacturers have have to get creative with how they do things. For example, the PCI bus only allows one logical device per slot, and the BDA drivers only allow one tuner per logical device, so really you can only get one tuner per card on PCI. So how do dual tuner cards work then? They get creative. The Hauppage Nova-T 500 is a PCI card with two USB tuners and a USB controller chip on board. getting round the BDA limitation by appearing as two separate USB tuners. The down side of this is you can run into USB driver and implementation problems that seem to plague the interface. With this card there is also an issue if you set your HTPC to sleep, as it takes the cards about 20 seconds to properly wake up. As I don't set this machine to sleep it isn't a problem, but MediaPortal does have an option to get round this if you do need your HTPC to sleep. There is a delay start setting that wakes the PC up an extra X number of seconds before a recording is to start so the start is not missed. It also prevents the TVServer part from timing out for that length of time before trying to timeshift TV.

Right now there are 2x Nova-t 500's in there giveing me 4 tuners. Due to the way DVB-T is broadcast and how MediaPortal works, I can actually stream, record or time shift far more that just 4 channels. I'll explain more about this in the MediaPortal post further down this thread (eventually).

A few months ago I got a couple of the Pinnacle 3010i's to try out. The first stumbling block I came across was the PCIe lane limitation of the AMD 780G chipset. Basically, if you use the second PCIe 16x slot (4x signal, 16x physical) two of the three PCIe 1x slots are disabled. Great. That means just one 3010i, no problem, I can work with that. The other issue is the drivers are 32bit only, so 64bit systems are out of the running. Guess what I'm running? That's right W7 Ultimate 64bit. The weird thing is the drivers install without issue, the card appears in MediaPortal and all looks great, it just can't get much of a signal in this configuration. I think it managed to find about 7 channels at one point, but that's pretty useless. I've sent one of the 3010is off to a friend building a 32bit HTPC, so hopefully he'll have more success than me.


OS and Software
I'm just running Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit on this. I did think about going with Windows Server 2008 (I have TechNet, so licenses aren't a problem) but it would have meant a major head ache to get the DVB-T cards recognised and to get MediaPortal TVServer installed. As it only has three main tasks at the moment (MediaPortal, Squeezebox Server and simple file serving) W7 is more than capable. It's a shame the Server OSs are so ham strung in their TV card support (but I guess that is understandable) as I really would have liked a grown up OS on here

The other option is to have Server 2008 as the host OS and the W7 running in a virtual machine. Normally you couldn't get access to peripherals in the VM, but as the tuners are all USB, you can get round that as USB devices can be assigned to VMs. I would like to give this a try, but I don't want to bring down the server for a couple of days while a mess around with the OS and VMs (never used either before, so I'm sure there would be a pretty steap learning curve).

Speaking of which, I'm running MediaPortal 1.1.0 Final. It's been running very well so far, far more stable than any previous version. The bug tracker bears this out as well, after two weeks there are only 11 items slated for 1.1.1, seven of which are complete.

The second duty is Squeezebox Server feeding music and online radio to all my Squeezebox players. Currently running beta SBS 7.6.0, but I generally run a the latest nightly build from whenever I remember to download and install it.


Future Upgrades
Possible upgrades include:

• Replacing the PERC 5/i's with PERC 6/i's for RAID-6 support
• Replacing one of the PERC's with a SAS expander
• Changing the case to something like the Sharkoon Rebel 12 for even more drive bays
• Splitting the server in two so the RAID and TV tuners are in different systems

Processor and memory wise I really don't need to change it at all, it doesn't see much load as it is. This might change when I move into a large place and have a potential half dozen TV clients and the same number of SqueezeBoxes to feed. But I can't see the guts of this needing replaced any time soon.

[Funkstar]

Systems (Desktops, Laptops and HTPCs)

Desktop

• Intel Core2Quad Q9550 (2.83GHz)
• Gigabyte EG45M-DS2H
• 8GB OCZ PC2-6400C5 800MHz Quad Channel
• 650GB Western Digital Caviar Blue
• 256MB PNY Quadro® NVS 290 PCI-E
• Antec 350W 80+ Efficient PSU
• Antec NSK1480 Slim Mini Desktop Case
• Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit
• Dell 2407 + 2408 monitors

Ikea desk which I've had for years and has served me well. From left to right I have the following: Lenovo S10e netbook, Dell 2407WPF (with Sound Bar), Spider Elite3 in front, iPod Classic 160GB, Dell 2408WPF, Sanyo Xacti HD800 in front, Logitech Squeezebox Touch, Logitech Squeezebox Controller, and an Archos 605Wifi right at the edge.



Here's the money shots! First we have a full internal view of the little Antec case. I'd recommend it, if you are willing to put up with the limitations of a low profile case. Obviously the main one is you are limited to low profile cards, this can be especially problematic if you want anything other than on board graphics. When I build this I really didn't know what graphics to put in there, having been reliant on built in graphics in laptops for a number of years. In the end of the Quadro NVS probably wasn't the best solution, but it's passive, low profile and will drive both my monitors though DVI. I do have an upgrade planned for this though.

I've replaced the 3x 80mm Antec fans with 3x 80mm Arctic Cooling PWM fans. They are very quiet normally, but being PWM they are only on when needed and the system is under load. This effectively makes the system silent under normal use.

Origainally I had a Zalman flower of some descriptiion as the CPU cooler, but it wasn't as quiet as I was expecting. So after a lot of digging (and some help from these very forums ) I found a large passive lump of a cooler on eBuyer for under £10 delivered. It was originally meant for a pre build system of some kind, but it was the best value passive cooler by miles for Socket 775. With the two 80mm fans right next to it, there is no real risk of it overheating. I did think I might need to fit some ducting or some kind of shrowd to direct air flow, but I don't think it's needed.

The extra cooling on the south bridge probably isn't needed, but I had the cooler kicking about so I figured I may as well use it. It would be quite good to replace the main chipset cooler as well, but the hole spacing is weird, and I haven't seen anything that will definitely fit when I've looked in the past.



I used to have my desktop actually on the desk top, but when I got the second monitor there really wasn't room for it, so it had to go underneath. To keep everything cool I mounted it upside down. This was easy, I just had to flip the DVD-R round so I could still use it. I made the four stretched out Z shaped handers from a spare length of 2-by-1 I had lying about. Each leg is glued and screwed together and then screwed into the desk itself with two long wood screws. This isn't going anywhere. Positioning it was easy, just flipped the table on it's top and laid it all out so the legs didn't cover any vents, block and ports or foul on any protrusions. I also wanted to make sure it was supported on all three sides and wouldn't slide back by mistake.

Future upgrades

• Replace graphics card with a passive ATI 5450
• Replace the 650GB hard drive with a 1TB (or larger) WD Caviar Black
• Add a 128GB SSD as a boot drive. This is dependant on them dropping to a less insane price though

Lenovo S10e Netbook

• Intel Atom N270 / 1.6 GHz
• Mobile Intel 945GSE Express
• 2 GB DDR2 SDRAM - 667 MHz (upgraded from 1GB)
• 500GB Samsung HM500JI Spinpoint M7 (upgraded from 160 GB - Serial ATA-150 - 5400 rpm)
• 10.1" TFT 1024 x 576 ( WSVGA )
• Integrated 1.3mp Webcam
• 802.11b/g WLAN
• 10/100 Ethernet
• ExpressCard/34 sSot

A strange thing happened when I upgraded the hard drive on this. No matter what I did in Acronis Disk Director, I couldn't get the partitions copied across and get Windows 7 installer to recognise or repair the boot table and get the Netbook booted. I've done this before on other systems without an issue, it just wouldn't work on this. I ended up just puting the 500GB drive in a re-installing W7. I did it from a 4GB pen drive this time, which was much easier than an external CD drive.

I found a really easy way to get the Windows 7 installer onto a USB stick, Microsoft even created a little tool to do exactly that: http://store.microsoft.com/Help/ISO-Tool



Asus R1F Convertable tablet


HTPCs

I have two, one in the living room and one in my bedroom. Specs to follow.

A third to follow in the kitchen at some point

[Funkstar]

Squeezebox

All my music and radio playback. Squeezebox 3 (also known as the Classic) in the livingroom and bedroom, a Boom in the Kitchen and a Touch (still in Beta) in the study. A Controller lives in the study, but is usually used in the livingroom.

I have a bit of a collection of other devices too.

[Funkstar]

Cars

Volkswagen Golf GTI MK5

• JVC KW-NX7000 - Multimedia and Navigation head unit
• JVC KS-BTA200 - Bluetooth Interface
• JVC KT-DB1000 - DAB Receiver
• Fixed external "bee sting" DAB aerial
• CANBus to ISO wiring loom and converter

Renault Megan Scenic

• Sony CDX-DAB6650 DAB Head Unit
• DAB Aerial splitter
• Renault steering week control adapter

[Funkstar]

Photo and Video

A growing collection of cameras and camcorders.

[Funkstar]

26-01-2010 - Thread created

I'll be adding to this regularly now. I find it much easier to write this kind of stuff up on forums, than in Word or in an email. Perhaps it's the feedback you get, or it could just be because I'm so used to writing on forums these days!

09-02-2010 - Updated Overview, Server and Desktop

10-02-2010 - Added more info to Desktop and Netbook.

13-03-2010 - Updated the Desktop details and added a few more photos

16-06-2010
- Moved the photos to my own hosting so non-HEXUS members can also read the thread with images.
- Merged some sections together to make room for my car and photo/video equipment.

17-08-2010
- Added photos of the server
- updated some of the description to match

01-09-2010
- Re-written and updated parts of the Server post.

[Phage]

Any chance of a diagram ? I'm a bit of a visual person you see.

[Funkstar]

All in good time

[scaryjim]

Originally Posted by Funkstar

26-01-2010 - Thread created

... it could just be because I'm so used to writing on forums these days!

16.5k posts on Hexus would point to this being more than likely

Looks like an interesting thread concept - will definitely try to remember to drop in from time to time (have you linkied it in your sig? I might actually remember it's here if you do )

[Funkstar]

Originally Posted by scaryjim

(have you linkied it in your sig? I might actually remember it's here if you do )

That's a good idea!

[handscombmp]

Are you planning to add pics as well of your stuff?

[Funkstar]

I plan to. Been busy this past few days so not had a chance.

I'm away offshore tomorrow for an unspecified amount of time, I'll get more done when I'm next home.

[kidzer]

Just noticed the link to this in your sig, I shall read with interest

Edit: Tried the Maya skin for MP yet? It is a rather excellent effort for a pre-1.0 release, its already replaced Monochrome 3.2 on my MP install!

[Funkstar]

I've been offshore for the past 10 days, I will definitely be trying Maya when I install the latest SVN of MP when I get home (which is tomorrow). I've been following that skin since it was first announced.

I've been using StreamedMP for a while now, but the simplicity of Maya has really caught my eye.

I'll be doing another big update of the whole thread when I get home as well.

[kidzer]

Yep, I was a StreamedMP user until i switched to Monochrome/Indigo (after a while using XBMC, remote configuration seems to be a lot easier with MP though - and I managed to get it running well!) - Maya looks to be the way to go though!