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WildWest
10-23-2005, 12:03 PM
So I am at this doctors house, a customer of mine. He is into high tech stuff and has the money to drop so I asked him what new toys he had as of late. He showed me this neat little music and video file server he built that was in his closet. He had wireless problems at his house so he controls it via some kind of line carrier control on his house wires. It's some bare bones optical hard drive with XP on it for remote access. So this thing just sits in his closet and runs and runs 24/7. When he wants to access any music or such though out the house or on his main system its right there at the remote waiting to go.

Soooooooooooo as I am enjoying the new Tivo and its wireless connection to the Tivo Desktop on my laptop I say to myself. I want a little optical server in my closet! LOL Well, that would be super kewl I think. With Windows XP allowing remote access I don't need anything but a simple CPU box in the closet that I can get into from my laptop. It would be there for jpeg viewing on the TV, internet radio listening and MP3's.

My problem is that I just didn't get all the hard details of how he built this cute lil box with an optical hard drive. My wife could set up the remote access and all but I need some direction on building this little CPU. Any computer gurus here able to steer me in the right directions? I did some web searches but must not be plugging in the right search words or some damn thing. I did find this neat device called a Squeezebox but it's not what I want. Thanks ahead! :thmbsp:

BobP
08-03-2006, 10:48 AM
Keeping PC file server in a closet is a FIRE HAZARD. You do not want to do this burning your house down and collecting no fire insurance is no fun.

Keep server in a basement, under the stairs or wherever it is out of the plain view, but NEVER in non-ventilated enclosure.

BeerCan
08-03-2006, 11:27 AM
You mentioned squeezbox. I would like to point out that the slimserver software does not require the squeezebox to work. It will stream to any device that can handle the formats it serves. Unfortunatly it does not send jpegs, but mp3's and radio stations are no problem. It has a web interface so "remote" contrlling is not an issue. It also works on most os'es. Best of all is the slimserver software is free so its a no brainer to try. http://www.slimdevices.com/su_downloads.html

JimmyNeutron
08-03-2006, 09:50 PM
Keeping PC file server in a closet is a FIRE HAZARD. . :saywhat: