Home Media, Part 2 (Storage. No, firewall.)

For starters, I need more storage. My main office computer is a Mac Mini hooked up to a 20" flat screen. It's got an 80g drive which filled up last year sometime. At that point, I went with an external USB enclosure with a 500g drive. It was fairly cheap (thanks Newegg!) and allowed me to move my iTunes library off to another drive, which freed up my primary volume considerably.

At 500g, I had way more space then I needed. I decided to partition the drive in half and give Time Machine a try. It was incredibly simple and easy to setup. Just the way I like it! On top of that, I felt moderately better that I was backing up important documents, photos, and home video.

Anyway, back to the point. I need more storage. I would like to start moving my DVD collection online so that I can stream it downstairs to the PS3. I'm pretty lazy and this would save me some trips up the stairs. Furthermore, I get kind of tired of swapping disks in the PS3 from playing games to watching DVDs.

So, because I'm not only lazy, but also cheap, I started looking around at the spare equipment that I had stored up in the office. I just figured I'd repurpose some existing equipment and fire up Linux and Samba and be done with it. There are probably enough parts lying around to build about 3 pc's, but it's all pretty old stuff. I have 2 working pc's, one of which is a Windows gaming machine that powers down randomly. The other is my firewall which runs Debian at the moment.

The firewall it is. But, before I repurpose that box, I need a different firewall. (I know this is a long ways from storage, but bear with me) I decided to upgrade my wireless access point to be wireless access point/firewall. The excellent DD-WRT package made this very easy in addition to adding some nice QoS functionality that I wasn't using before. I won't go into all the details of how to do it, because I believe that it is documented well elsewhere. Definitely drop a comment if you have some questions about it. I can go into details of my setup in a future post.

Before I closed out the firewall project, I ran over to Shields Up to verify the firewall settings were sufficiently hiding me from portscans. Yep, all good! Everything comes back "stealth". Now... where was I?