As I've been accustomed to in the last while with all the smartphone proliferation, young people prefer to stream content rather than have a dedicated device which stores for quick retrieval.
Since the value of entertainment by all accounts has plummeted in cost, as return on investment has become a lose lose scenario, most of the cartels (RIAA, MPAA, and other governing bodies) have seen fit to institute a highway robbery scheme to force everyone to pay to play.
Since I refuse to play into those rules, I decided to build my own specific system, and to build on streaming artists I enjoy. This made more sense to tackle in this way than paying out the nose for it. A lot of the field now wants many users to pay into a cloud structure, a distant aspect, where I like and prefer the ability to control the content I own.
One weekend had me trying three avenues. First FreeNas, it's a nice little packaged OS that works on both a USB stick or on a physical disc (Compact or DVD). The downside is that FreeNas must never be installed on a physical hard drive. (Loses points right there).
Second was the installation of a trial evaluation of Server 2012, which at first has some interesting elements but I ran into the dreaded lack of network drivers. Somehow the OS itself had the network drivers completely negated, realizing this I wasn't going to sweat any of those details. I moved back to FreeNas.
A little bit about my first experiences with FreeNas, though there are some nice elements of the web GUI, the real fact here is that there is a lot digging, and planning that has to be done before using this in a full time aspect.
For many home users, this is a poorman's band aid server option for streaming and storing anything on old hardware. But for big time enterprise cost cutting companies the operational side of things this could be very useful for cost benefit if there is hardware that supports this design, I've been building two Tyan motherboards with a onboard USB connection I think will work perfectly with this.
Next up, the way the functioning is with FreeNas, built on top of the FreeBSD kernel, this wasn't entirely difficult, until I ran into something unforgivable. Router issues. The IP address scheme should pull all devices on the network (in theory), but with this install, which happened three times, each with different results. Default password issues, network scheme problems, and finally assigning the right server address bugged out the network, which resulted in a hard reboot.
Perhaps it is my overzealous approach which brings up the question, if these software OS's kits are supposed to work right out of the box, why am I getting weird shit? I was in mad scramble trying to trace back strange behavior, software glitch issues with the home network, all with odd results that shouldn't happen.
I went back to the drawing board for a optimal aspect for home streaming to attached devices. In my third attempt I tried the CentOS option, but I am not holding out any hope here as open source of late has been a tad unreliable, and seriously buggy with zero day patch updates, hence the often retorted comment: perma-stage alpha tester.
CentOS was a complete waste. Two versions, one a 6.4 Release and the brand new 7.0 didn't end well. 6.4 I almost had installed until the kernel decided to do a 360 and wouldn't boot after installing a kdump partition for errors. Anything with Linux is notorious error's but nonetheless I trudged onwards. When 6.4 couldn't hang, I bounced to 7.0, and that was a complete fail. I didn't even get to the install section before problems occurred. So it was back to the drawing board.
After doing some research I proposed a hypothesis, and that only specific types of server OS'es could run on a small server without error. Unfortunately, I wasn't going to do anything with Ubuntu as my history with that distro was less than stellar, so it was decided to take another crack at the Windows server install. This time though I would take a different tact and figure out how to get it to work right. I end up trying Essentials, as its a no frills basic OS, with options for updatability if I so choose. Otherwise the process took less than a half hour. I was up and setting up the server.
My experience with this server will prove very useful for my future as I get acclimated to the next paradigm. As for Linux, as much I love it, I do not think it will ever have the dedicated desktop construction that other more prominent OS's have. It just does not work in the way it should, as people are constantly tweaking, revising, as there is this aura of a ever present alpha stage to a lot of it.
I cut my teeth on the Debian fork, not as prevalent now but going from that to Cygwin for minor programing aspects makes more sense at this stage. I am just tired of the bashing on all sides, if you like something then stick with what works, yes its true I was one of those haters, but now I see the other side, I see how each one can benefit. Its just a matter of personal taste.
Thanks for reading.
