I have a lot of digital media. A lot. There’s movies (that I own on DVD) ripped to hard drives, there’s digital music, there’s downloaded TV shows. All of this has been collected on an ever-increasing number of hard drives, connected together on whatever spare computer I happened to have knocking about, usually precariously balanced in my office where cats sleep on the warm surfaces.

The front-end to this back-end-held-together-with-duct-tape-and-luck is a slick, shiny Mac Mini, loaded with the latest version of XBMC (and the MediaStream skin) – an example of open-source software at its best. The interface is great, and – importantly for my needs – XBMC doesn’t care where your media is stored. It could be local, on attached external hard drives, or (as in my case) across the network on various internal and external drives attached via USB, SATA and Firewire, on a computer with a different operating system (Windows). The Mac Mini sits in the entertainment center in the living room, connected to our TV via an HDMI cable, allowing us to watch our media at the best possible resolution.

For a long time I’ve been painfully aware of the dangers inherent in storing our entire digital life on these hard drives. If just one of them was to die, we’d lose a lot of data. Of course I should have been backing it all up, but let’s not go into that. So, when we were finally in a position to spend a little bit of cash on putting together an actual Media Server, I jumped at the chance.

The hardware

• 1 bitchin’ motherboard and AMD Phenom 2.6GHz quad-core processor
• 4GB memory
• 1 80GB hard drive (exclusively for the operating system)
• 4 1TB hard drives for media
• Assorted bits and pieces to make the whole thing function

Oh, and a massive computer case. I mean look at it, seriously (it’s in the image above). This thing is ridiculous! It can fit 12 hard drives in it (if you can find a power supply that can power 12 hard drives…). It’s a work of art, and it’s as eerily quiet. No whooshing of fans, no humming of hard drives. Just a faint background hum from the 120mm fans. It’s actually rather a comforting noise. The whole lot cost just under $1000 from the lovely people at Newegg.

So all-in-all a pretty sweet setup. The server lives in my office, and is connected to our switch via ethernet. The Mac Mini (which is downstairs) is also connected to the switch (which is in my office, upstairs) via a ridiculously long ethernet cable that runs up the stairs. My next geek-to-live project will be wiring the house for ethernet, but until then it’s a bit ghetto.

The OS

Any server needs an operating system. I wanted something lean and mean, so I chose Ubuntu Server Edition. It’s a command-line version of Ubuntu, a Linux-based operating system that’s free and easy to install on almost any computer you can think of. There’s two versions of any Ubuntu Edition - the latest and greatest, and something called the LTS (Long Term Support) – a “safety first” release that’s suitable for servers because it’s supported by the Ubuntu community for 5 years.

The software

There isn’t actually that much of it right now! This server is – for the time being at least – just a glorified hard drive! After setting up the operating system on the 80GB hard drive, I went through the process of creating a RAID5 array on the 4 1TB drives I’d bought, giving me a smidge under 3TB of drive space once it was done. The next few days were spent copying data from many and various old hard drives into neatly organized directories on the new server, and then sharing the relevant directories across the network so my wife can see her stuff, I can see mine, and the Mac Mini in the living room can stream our collection of movies, music and TV.

Periodically I run a backup script which uses rsync to upload changed files from the server to a secure folder on my web host. That way, even if two of the hard drives on the server failed, I’ve always got a relatively current backup of both mine and my wife’s documents on which to fall back. Because remember kids, RAID is not a backup solution.

The one piece of software I did install was Firefly – an open-source media server that allows you to stream your music to any computer with iTunes installed. So now we have a single repository for our music, and can access it from anywhere in the house, including the sofa.

Finally

This server is way overpowered for what I’m doing with it right now. But what it’s doing is just the tip of the iceberg. I have a system that – in time – will perform a lot of functions in our house. From home security to telephony, this computer has the power and the stability to do it all. As for its current job? It’s performing magnificently, and has been running non-stop for almost 30 straight days.