Old Welcome Page
From some time ago ...
Why are we here?
I've been reviewing all of the equipment in the house and getting somewhat annoyed that they simply will not work together, so the question of how to make things better came up. Having put a 1000baseT hub in with the new TV to link up the TV, PS3, Media Player and at some point the SkyHD box, I'm then told I should be using on-line services for films and the like. However Sky are selling me an 8Mb service, but only providing BT with a payment for a 2Mb capped service. I'm paying BT for the same service and getting 7Mb, but that is for the business services while personal stuff should be on the Sky line. So streaming high res films is simply not even possible, and downloading will soon use up my allowance on bandwidth. So since the paid for cloud is just worth spending any money on, what can we do internally in the home.
Having been playing with computers for over 25 years, I have a growing stack of equipment, and it's all networked with an array of hubs. The server rack has some 10Tb of storage across a number of machines, and we have a growing catalog of music, video and books all available without any need for the broadband even to be working. Currently the music and video material is streamed via Mediatomb but this is now groaning under the volume of material, and Mediatomb is not really able to index any quantity of tracks anyway. The books and magazines are available as pdf files and these are easy to both index and search via a local database, so some means of linking the other media and still stream it is the current problem.
The aim of this site is to provide a central archive of how to make a local cloud of material work without any links to chargeable services. On the whole a totally license free setup of software should be possible, and current Linux distributions provide the majority of the packages needed directly from their repositories. The starting point is to document all of the available tools and work out which can be used to to link the range of components that I currently have in the house.
New Toy ... TM-Nano-3T Combo
Another New Toy ... Living with Samsung S6 Phone