Want To Pick Your Brains Just For Fun...

[zunebuggy]

I have a Compaq Proliant 3000 server, Exabyte Mammoth EXB-220 and an Exabyte 430 M2 Mammoth-2 Tape Library. I also have 8 spare pentiums all networked (one of them I use as a sandbox PC). I have a dual core laptop that I am using as a Plex Media Server PC and it is connected to a 1TB external and a 2TB external. The 1TB external contains all my photos, music and PDFs (important saved documents) and the 2TB contains all my movies, home movies and TV shows. The Plex Media server is accessed through my LG Smart TV. I have a quad core laptop that I use almost all the time. I have shared directories set up on almost everything. I also have a Slingbox. I want to use all this equipment to basically be able to access all of my media from my spartphone or any other Internet enabled device. I am not currently using my Compaq 3000 yet and I was thinking of using it as a VMWare server and run XP, Ubununtu (or other flavors of Linux), Apple OS and believe it or not... I wanted to try Amiga OS to see if it could be done... I want to try all this for fun and for a little practicality. I want to dedicate one PC to emulators (that I am hoping I can access through a network but I realize this is likely not possible)... I am trying to decide if it would not be better to run Plex on the Compaq 3000 and use the dual core to run VMWare and basically I just wanted to open up the conversation to discussing if you had this equipment how would you connect it to get the most from it? I know a lot of this stuff is considered old junk, but it was given to me and I could trash it, but since I have it I'd like to have some fun with it and wanted to get different oppinions on how you would use this hardware. Also, I do not have a static IP and am not willing to pay for one. I thought of hosting some of my web pages, but that is pretty much out with a dynamic IP.

Thank you.

[Scott DeLeeuw]

Awesome first post!

Like you I have trouble getting rid of old equipment, even when their power consumption outweighs their computing power.

An option that might be insanely simple for this is to simply use PlayOn. PlayOn has a mobile portion for the server that allows you to access via SmartPhone/mobile devices away from home. They've had trouble from time to time on local media, but last I checked it was working.

A few things you'll need to consider:
1) Internet upload bandwidth from your house, do you have enough? Check speedtest.net
2) If any files need to be transcoded you'll want to ensure the PlayOn server is on a PC/server that is beefy enough to handle it. On the fly transcoding takes a lot of processing power.
3) Changing IPs, easily solved with dynamic DNS like dyndns.org or a comparable alternative.

PlayOn has a free trial, you could just download that quick and test it out.