Oracle: My little media server

I wanted a reliable home media server and so far the process to get this up and running has been very fun and rewarding. This is where I store my movies, tv shows and music. I’m a big fan of XBMC and I wanted to set up sharing the xbmc database through mysql to all my clients.

I also wanted to be able to stream my music to multiple clients. Initially I used daap but I have since moved on to SubSonic.

I wanted a server that met a few key requirements:

1. Low power
2. Stable
3. Wife Friendly

Low Power

To meet the low power requirement I went with an Intel Atom D410 motherboard, with a clock speed of 1667 MHZ.

Power is very expensive in Jamaica and you want to ensure that your gadgets use the least amount of power necessary. My idle power consumption with no hard drives connected is about 80 Watts. This is still a pretty high number and a more reliable PSU should cut power consumption by half.

Stable

I want to spend more time watching TV and less time doing system admin type stuff. This influenced the operating systems choice as initially I went with FreeNAS and loved it. However since it was based on BSD which I am not very comfortable with, whenever customizations were required it took way too much time! For example I was never able to get MYSQL up and running on FreeNAS and MYSQL is required to share my XBMC library.

Then I discovered OpenMediaVault a Debian based NAS distribution. I have spent most of my time on Linux using Debian and Ubuntu so the decision was easy to switch to OMV.

Wife Friendly

This is perhaps the most important requirement! If it is not she will not use it.

System Specs