I rebuilt the media centre recently, as the AMD was only a temporary stand in. It was using far too much power compared to the old mobile CPU.
The new i3 is perfect for this. Enough CPU grunt to ditch the 3rd party video card power hog, everything on board. I’m an energy saving nut, so this is the lowest power system I could put together.
A low power media centre PC.
When I changed over to Naked ADSL2+ with Internode, I had to sort out a replacement for the home phone. It was a tough journey and about 12mths of problems before I found a reliable combination of devices.
The problems ranged from
After 12 mths of drama’s I found only Panasonic DECT handsets where reliable with the VOIP solutions.
I also found that running a “single box” solution is less hassles than “multiple box” solutions.
DECT has a much greater cordless range than most other handsets.
QoS is somewhat of a confusing area. The most common method of marking packets at Layer 3 (IP) is with a DSCP tag. This method replaces the earlier Type Of Service (TOS) tag, and uses the same space in the IP header.
Whilst DSCP is very flexible, with few required values, there are some commonly accepted methods of using it. DSCP also overlaps with TOS values. There is a table showing the relationship between DSCP and TOS here.
Like most people I have been watching the “Cloud Services” develop and participated in some of the discussions surround the space. These are a collection of the best articles I have found that have shaped my thinking heavily.
A series of articles on designing Open Networks – Jericho Forum
http://www.blackhat.com/presentations/bh-usa-04/bh-us-04-simmonds.pdf
http://www.opengroup.org/jericho/
This is the future of IT over the next 10 years as predicted by Microsoft’s chief navel gazer. I gotta say, I think he’s right.
I noticed something very strange with a new fire suppression system. There were no valve controls on the system, of the four bottles, only one was controlled. I had to look further into this.
One of the sites I work on had installed an Intergen Fire Suppression system. The basic idea is that in the event of a fire, enough oxygen is displaced from the room, that a fire cannot be sustained, but humans will remain conscious.
The time came to decommission the Home Server once I realised how much power it was pulling. My power meter debacle had concealed the 24/7 150w consumption, chewing into my solar feed in tariff at 44c in the daytime and my green power rate at 21c at night. This was costing me about $400/yr in power bills – it had to go.
I have toyed with various options, but the most obvious was using the other machine that was on 24/7 – the Vista Media Centre.
I’ve been trying to reduce the power of my Home Server and Media Centre. Since my Power Meter debacle, I am now re-testing all the equipment and getting some rude shocks.
One of the positives out of this is that my 1TB Western Digital My Book Essential and 300GB Western Digital My Passport Essential both spin down and save power. On USB, this is a nice feature, as many of the generic external cages don’t spin the drive down.
The WD’s spin down on XP, Vista and Windows Home Server which is based on Server 2003. The timeout appears to be independent of the OS settings.
OK – it came time to rebuild the media centre.
Here are ALL the steps I went through to getting the software install right. A Vista Media Center Build Document.
The changing of hardware, testing codecs, utilites, guides and apps had led to some long running config and stability issues that I couldn’t resolve. Application errors, crashes, codecs, screen sizes, resolutions and audio were all problematic.
After round one a while ago, I had managed to stabilise and expand the system somewhat. The stable hardware config now is
I’ve been trying to have the whole digital home experience for a while now. I’ve reviewed Vista Media Centre, Home Server, Wireless N before, the experiences there are documented.
The impossible dream I am thinking of consists of seamless integration between:
C’mon guys – no logins for Technet subscriptions – if you can’t keep your directory up maybe you should consider OpenID.
Jesper had a similar problem last week.
This is why I learnt a long time ago – if you have an AD problem – it’s probably DNS.
Creating an empty DNS zone with the same name as your internal zone can lead too all sorts of frustration – especially with the multiple locations in AD that it can end up in. You’ll find yourself knee-deep in ADSI Edit faster than you would ever want to be.
I love DNS, but it’s gotta be right, and it’s easy to get wrong.
When I first heard about Windows Home S
erver (WHS) – I was pretty reluctant to bother. I was happily running Server 2003 with a 1.5TB software RAID 5 array and am not a fan of NAS, so didn’t get the point.
With the release of Power Pack 1 (PP1), and support for external USB backups, I decided to take another look. I have not looked back.
OK – at it’s simplest WHS does three things
http://panko.shidler.hawaii.edu/SSR/Mypapers/whatknow.htm
And this is why we have to wean business off Excel.
Just like programming – it’s all mistakes mistakes mistakes.
Speed, I need speed, and speed with coverage would be good. I was using a Netgear DG834G previously, and had a pretty good run out of it. I know Netgear kit ain’t the best, but it beats DLink in my experience, and is probably the biggest selling home and SOHO kit in Australia.
I had the same problem as before – Activesync changing my Proxy settings in my Jasjam to use the work proxy, breaking web browsing on the thing via my Telco.
Activesync is different to the Mobile Device Thingy on Vista and although the fix was the same, it took me a bit to find.
Think of this as a Vista Version of KB915151
My Vista SP1 Laptop refused to connect to our MS ISA VPN for work at some point. There was no error given on the connection interface, but the Application Event Log recorded an Event ID 20227 – RASClient
The user somewhere\someone dialed a connection named WorkVPN which has failed. The error code returned on failure is 800.
Some searching showed others with similar results. The common cause is Windows OneCare. It’s interaction with the Windows Firewall blocks VPN protocols by default. I’m not sure why it doesn’t prompt to allow the traffic, a problem with the application.
So with today’s perspective on updates vs uptime, is that impressive, or scary?
I’ve been a Toms fan forever, but don’t get there much anymore. This is an excellent article.
http://www.tomsguide.com/us/video-streaming-need-to-know-part-1,review-760.html
I recently swapped out my noisy old model Pioneer DVD burner in the flaky media centre for a new Pioneer DVR-215BK with the grand price of $37.
I am pleased to say that it reads DVD’s reliably, which the last one didn’t from new and is quiet, which the last one wasn’t either.
Now I’m not saying it’s silent, but combined with a Media Centre built this way, I can’t hear it.
5/5
Although the Media centre is still a flaky piece of crap.
I’ve been moving all my home PC’s over to wireless as I reshuffle the rooms in my house. As part of this I have had a nightmare of a time with one machine being unable to connect to anything, the media centre dropping connections to the server, and other general weirdness.
I tracked it all to the Browser service and lack of decent name resolution. I have never really liked the browser service, it’s never reliable, but in this scenario, it should perform fine.
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