The other night, I noticed that updates for my Fedora 8 home server were no longer available through yum.  It must have reached its end-of-life.  That’s not surprising since Fedora 11 recently came out.  It was time to upgrade.

I’ve been meaning to try out Ubuntu for a while now, so I decided to download 9.04 server and give it a try.  I’d been a strong Fedora (and Red Hat before that!) supporter for years, but for the most part, Linux is Linux, so how difficult could it be to switch.

Well, it was a painless process installing.  It took only about 15 minutes on my ancient AMD box.  But, I ran into a snag when I tried to boot.  All I got was the word GRUB repeating across the screen to infinity.  After some troubleshooting, I managed boot to the command line (the server version doesn’t come with a GUI).  I ended up having to remove all but the main drive from the server, and mess round with Grub to get it to boot without the install CD.

I thought everything was fine until I added in the other 4 drives. Then I had the same problem.  I figure somehow I ended up with a master boot record on a different drive (I have a PCI controller card that I think contributed to that problem).  When I added in the data drives, things got confusing.

It was then that I remember having similar issues the last time I rebuilt the server.  Enough was enough.  I was tired of managing 5 drives + 2 external drives on 8 year old hardware.  So, I went to Newegg.ca and ordered some new hardware.  I got a 2GHz dual core Celeron processor, a Gigabyte mother board with gigabit ethernet and onboard video, 4 GB ram, and 2 1TB hard drives.  I figure that ought to last me another 5 years or so.

Now I just have to make due without TV because I cancelled my satellite subscription a couple months ago.  Everything should be here by Monday though.  I guess I’ll just have to read a book, or take some pictures, or something like that.

I have a network in my house with a lot of devices connected in different ways. I have a Linksys WRT54G wireless g router as my access point. Plugged in to that is a DLink gigabit switch. Plugged into that are 3 Macs and Linux server. I also have a Windows laptop connected to the router via Wi-Fi.

This all worked great, and I never had a wiring issue because all of these computers are in the lower level of my house, and I have a utility room that is located in such a way that it shares a wall with almost every other room on the floor. I ran into a bit of a problem when I wanted to connect my first-gen XBox to the network and use it in my home gym upstairs to watch TV shows stored on the server.

I didn’t want to drill a hole in the floor to get a network cable upstairs. I couldn’t do that even if I wanted to because of where the gym was. So, I started thinking of buying a wireless adapter for the XBox, but that was going to be about $75 bucks. Then, I started thinking that I might be able to create a wireless bridge between 2 routers.

A wireless bridge uses the Wi-Fi capability of two routers to connect them instead of using an ethernet cable. This is easily accomplished using 3rd party router firmware from DD-WRT and following these instructions.

There are a couple of things to consider before trying to do this:

• Installing 3rd party firmware on a router can void your warranty, and if not done correctly, can brick it.
• Not all routers are supported by the DD-WRT firmware. Check their hardware compatibility chart.
• You’ll be limited to one device connected to the second router. If you add more, it’s the router’s mac address that gets stored in the routing table, not the end device. This will definitely cause problems.

I wonder if there’s a way to overcome the last point? It would be great to be able to use the second router to extend wireless range.

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Having a Mac mini as a home theatre PC is great because it allows me to listen to my music collection on my living room sound system. Doing this requires an iTunes library though, so I’ve been looking for a way to synchronize the library on the mini with the library on my iMac.

This sounds a lot easier than it actually is. I have my music collection on a share on my server, so I don’t have to duplicate my music on both Macs, but it’s really the library files that need to be synced. The reason for this is that iTunes doesn’t have a function to monitor a directory for changes in content. If I add an album to my library from my iMac, the music gets copied to the server, but the mini won’t know about it, so that album will never get played there.

There’s an app called Syncopation that will keep two iTunes libraries in sync, but it requires the application to be open on both macs, and it costs $25. That’s too much to pay for something I should be able to do for free.

What I decided to try (and I suggest you back up your library files if you try this) was to share the iTunes directory on my iMac with my mini. Then, I just made an alias on my mini from ~/Users/username/iTunes to the iTunes directory on my iMac.

I’ve been successful with this so far. I’ve had music playing on both macs at the same time, and updates to the library appear to work properly although I haven’t really put this method through it’s paces yet. I imagine I’m going to run into trouble if both macs try to update the library at the same time, but hopefully iTunes will handle this gracefully.

All of this won’t work between a Mac and a PC. There are differences between the library files for Mac and Windows. I think it has to do with file paths, although you might have some success between two PCs (would Windows shortcuts even work?).

I’ve done something similar with iPhoto as well. I just opened iPhoto while holding the option key and chose the library on my iMac. This will only work if iPhoto isn’t open on the other Mac though since iPhoto locks the directory when it’s open.

Anyway, if there’s a better way to do this, I definitely want to know about it. Maybe there’s even a free app out there to do the job. If you know of a solution, please send me an email, or better still, leave a comment for all to read.

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