All in one small wonder
#1
Hey, thought Ill show my build here aswell. It was originally a Celeron 847 which got a substantial upgrade to 1037U during the holidays Smile

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#2
Love the diagram.
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#3
Real nice setup.

What cases are you hard drives in... they look like rubber cases and look cool.
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#4
(2014-01-09, 00:48)Jetster Wrote: Love the diagram.

+1

How did you do that?
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#5
Don't get me wrong, your configuration is really cool, but that diagram put this over the top. Made the whole process more clear.
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#6
Hehe, thanks for the props on the diagram. Just thought Ill have some fun with the google docs draw tool one time, aimed for something that looks a bit "homely" Smile
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#7
(2014-01-11, 23:48)jayzirl Wrote: What cases are you hard drives in... they look like rubber cases and look cool.

Something like this - http://www.ebay.com/itm/5-Color-Silicone...5d486e0301
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#8
Any particular reason you have 4 network interfaces on your HTPC? One GigE interface plus an AP would do all that...
If I have helped you or increased your knowledge, click the 'thumbs up' button to give thanks :) (People with less than 20 posts won't see the "thumbs up" button.)
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#9
(2014-01-22, 08:31)nickr Wrote: Any particular reason you have 4 network interfaces on your HTPC? One GigE interface plus an AP would do all that...

Hehe, this question has prompted me to write down the full backstory of my HTPC experience and how the All-In-One box was born. TLDR; I replaced 2 network appliances with this box.

Once upon a time there was a regular PC in another room that was used to serve media to the living room TV using a long HDMI cable and an even longer USB cable for the IR dongle. It worked like a multiseat setup but had its drawbacks - occasional performance issues when someone was playing a game on the same PCs main display or just the fact that this PC had to be turned on to even be able to watch anything using XBMC in the living room.

It was a pretty decent setup for a year or two though until the ATV2 became available quite cheaply and so the PC's side-task of running XBMC was replaced with the ATV2 sitting below the TV in the living room. This worked out pretty well allthough obviously compared to a state of the art gaming PC the ATV2 XBMC experience wasnt as smooth. And the requirement of having to have the gaming PC powered on was unchanged.

Now the arrival of the ATV2 in the home happened around the same time my ISP started offering fiber to the home, which meant another new box to be installed that's doing fiber to ethernet conversion. I already had two pieces of networking gear - a cheap Thomson device for the ISPs IPTV vlan, for internet it was configured as a bridge towards my Juniper device which handled the actual routing and also worked as a WiFi AP although only up to 54Mbit/s. They all were located below the TV as that is the most central place at the home anyway.

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All the cabling and clutter. From top left: IR receiver, ATV2, Nexus7 for show, Thomson router (gray/white), Motorola STB, Juniper NS5GT, Huawei ONT ontop

The first idea to try to make the situation a bit betters was to try to get the Juniper also to handle the IPTV vlan, but in these small boxes running ScreenOS the vlan support was not the greatest unfortunately (no way to have one port output untagged...). As this was not possible and also the 802.11g WiFi was getting a bit slow with the addition of several mobile devices I decided to get a router to replace it. But since I like decent networking gear the only real option to replace these two boxes for me would have been the RB2011 with a price at 120€. Unfortunately it was out of stock at a local retailer.

Around this time I became interested in building a mini-ITX board to serve as a NAS so I wouldnt have to power on the big PC all the time. And as I found an excellent board by Gigabyte based on Sandy with 2 GbE interfaces. I started imagining how it could all come together with the routing and replacing the ATV2 aswell. In a a couple of weeks I gradually rmoved functionality from the appliances to the DIY box while making sure I dont get any stability issues with this small black Single Point of Failure. Fortunately all was good so it was running for 10 months without hiccups and got replaced by almost the same board but this time fanless and Ivy Bridge CPU. Didnt even reinstall anything, just changed the board in the case. The End.


Now looking into the future I will probably want to move to a VM based setup to run the router and NAS as one guest and XBMC, possibly OE as another one just for added flexibility and even longer uptime. Could even add some Windows guests to serve as terminals for some old laptops I have at home. Fun times ahead - this one should do VT-d.
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