Ask Slashdot: Easiest Way To Consolidate Household Media? 272
First time accepted submitter Lordfly writes "The wife and I have started looking to buy a house. In the spirit of that, I've been giving away books, CDs, and DVDs to 'downsize' the pile of crap I'll have to lug around when we do find the right place. That got me thinking about digital files. I'm perfectly okay with giving up (most) books, CDs, and DVD cases. The only music I buy are MP3s anyway, and we stream most everything else if we wanted to watch a show or movie. That being said, I have a desktop, my wife has an old Macbook, we both have tablets, and I also have an Android smartphone. I'd like to set up something on an extra Windows box shoved in a closet that lets me dump every digital file we have (photos, music, ebooks, movies) and then doles it out as necessary to all of our devices. Unfortunately my best computer geek days are likely behind me (photography and cooking have consumed me since), so while I CAN schlep around a command line, I've lost most of my knowledge, so go easy on the 'just apt-get FubarPackageInstaller.gzip and rd -m Arglebargle' stuff. Something easy enough for my wife to use would be a major plus. So: What's the best way to make your own personal 'cloud'?"
Re:Synology (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:An ultimately simple concept... (Score:3, Interesting)
Agreed. And in the spirit of K.I.S.S., I'd suggest you use external storage like a drobo [drobo.com]. You can grow the disk as you see fit, no technical expertise needed. Just add/swap drives as you go. Braindead simple.
No, I don't work for them, but for simple self-maintaining medium sized storage they work pretty well. I've got 4 (3 at work, one at home), and the only problem I've had was when I put a bad WD drive in a unit and it fried the slot.
Re:Just buy a NAS (Score:3, Interesting)
I picked up a Synology DS1812+ earlier this year. It's expensive (~$1000 without drives), but I couldn't build anything in as small a form factor as they could. It's got an Intel Atom CPU, so it uses very little power. It's been reliable so far and the GUI is excellent.
It's just a Linux-based system that uses mdRAID/ext4 under the hood, but I got tired of maintaining so many systems and just wanted something simple that was small and worked. If you'd rather roll your own, you can obtain the same functionality and reliablity as any of the commercial offerings. Form factor, simplicity, and GUI are really what they are providing.
Eureka! I found the source of Background Radiation (Score:2, Interesting)
I'd like to set up something on an extra Windows box shoved in a closet that lets me dump every digital file we have (photos, music, ebooks, movies) and then doles it out as necessary to all of our devices.
It's folks like THIS guy. Their unpatched infected Windows machines sit forgotten in closets all over the world, spraying the malicious packets of Code Red, Nimda, Sober, Blaster, Sasser, etc. despite modern OSs being invulnerable. We call this Internet Background Radiation; This is the reason your modem's "activity" light blinks even if you've just turned it on -- We're being scanned! This is why an unpatched machine connected to the net becomes infected in mere minutes just sitting there... From a raw sampling of unsolicited data coming into an Internet connection I can determine the date at which the sample was taken by the Internet Background Radiation collected, I can "carbon date" the age of the network traffic. Now think: Your ISP bills you for traffic... Are they billing you for all those packets that are dropped at your firewall / router? In a way we are all funding the malicious behavior, we are at least feeding the machines electrons...
The Internet is much like a primordial soup, configurations of malware self assemble from the fertile components of energized silicon. Code Red is infected by Nimda, which alerts modern bot-nets of vulnerable systems ripe for the picking. The cascade of malware produces patterns in the network similar to a neural network, still untrained, not yet aware of itself, so you assume... Yet, as another fertile machine is attached to the net its connection is immediately flooded with enticing electrons, and soon a new infection has formed, as if a neural cell forming a fresh synapse compatible with the type of nodes at the end points.
The malware authors each supply a simple cascading self propagating pattern that grows in complexity over time, but it is YOU and your Windows Media Servers who provided the core components -- the amino acids, so to speak -- that enabled the Sentient Machine Intelligence to emerge! It's YOU I blame for the DEATH OF ALL MANKIND!
Re:Legality? (Score:4, Interesting)
Does it really matter? If you're ripping DVDs or Blu-rays you're already violating the DMCA, even if you keep the original discs in spindles/binders/etc. in the attic. Whether you face legal ramifications depends entirely on whether anyone notices and cares, and as long as you're not publicly sharing the media online that's pretty unlikely.