This whole fileserver idea came to me the other day when I was thinking about how many cd’s and dvd’s I have and I can never keep track of what their contents are. A few of them are labled but sometimes I do burn other contents on there which is not reflected by what is on the label just to make use of the remaining disc space that I may have.
I’m quiet sick of that now, I just want to be able to find the files that I want, movies, applications, games, scripts, templates and mp3’s – sounds like fun right? I thought so too, but then I realised my php coding skills are not anywhere as good as coding exactly what I wanted. I didnt even consider .ASP since I have no idea what it entails. Lastly I thought about Coldfusion MX 7 -trendy but expensive then I remembered that you can use it as a Developer edition for free but limits access to the one IP address, which is not all that bad considering that I’m the only one that is going to use it.
I did a quick search for any Coldfusion scripts on Hotscripts.Com and I found one, which is called MediaStork which is still in its Alpha stage of development.
Mediastork is a server application that lets you manage all your media files. Including: Music, Movies, Games & Pictures. Mediastork is the future for your personal media management. It has the ability to store your files and make them available remotely. You can watch and play your files locally & remotely. Compete with a covers feature, mp3 playlist generator. See the features section for more details.
Sounds perfect right? Not quite it certainly works in certain categories but can’t seem to get the music category working and I kept ending up with errors on the MusicPath variables, could look into the source code since the author has encrypted the source code. I emailed the author a few times but unfortunately could not work out why it was giving me this error, so for now either I sit and wait until this first official release or code my own database application.
One of the main stumbling block is the choice of platform, either Windows IIS, Windows with Apache, PHP and MySQL or Linux with the Debian distro installed.
I decided to start off with the easiest part which is getting the hardware together for this fileserver. I didnt want to be overkill but I also didnt want something that was substandard which isnt going to be worth using in two years.
So the choices are the following starting off with the CPU:
CPU – Intel Celeron D 351 @ 3.2GHZ
Sounds like an overkill at first just to run a fileserver but I do intend to use this later on as a media center of some sort and as a testing server while I’m trying to work with Coldfusion MX 7
Overview
The Intel® Celeron® D processor on 90 nm process in the 478-pin package and in the FC-LGA775 Land package expands Intel’s processor family into value-priced PC market segments. Celeron D processors offer exciting new technologies at a great value. The Celeron D processors include a larger integrated L2 cache and faster processor system bus when compared to Celeron processors. The Celeron D processor is built on the foundation of Intel’s successful engineering and manufacturing leadership with Intel’s commitment of technology, quality and reliability to value-priced PC market segments. The Celeron D processors provide customers the capability to affordably get onto the Internet, utilize educational programs, home-office software and productivity applications with great computing and multimedia power.
Xbitlabs had an overclocked Celeron D 351 Processor to 4Ghz but it will probably a while before I go anywhere near there.
RAM – Hynix 1GB kit
Motherboard – MSI Socket 775 PM8M2-V
Western Digital 300GB IDE
Honli Case – Shaw 550W PSU
Total Cost of this Fileserver = $585