Network Media Player/Server How To
by BaerConsultLLC on Jan.13, 2010, under How To's, Server Configuration
Ok, so let’s start with the requirements.
First, you’ll need a physical machine or anything running Windows, Mac, or Ubuntu. It can even be a virtual machine! For all intensive purposes, we’ll go with Ubuntu since it’s free and downloadable. Second, you’ll need a Network Interface Card (NIC) for that machine. I recommend going with Intel Gigabit Pro GT/1000 cards. They’re a bit more expensive, but it’s all we use here at BaerConsulting and we’ve yet to have one fail on us. Even if you don’t run a gigabit network, I still recommend Intel Gigabit cards. Third, you’ll need something to play these media files on. At home, I have a D-Link DSM-520, a Buffalo Media Player, an XBox 360, and a Playstation 3. Out of these media players, a Playstation 3 seems to produce the best quality and is most compatible with codec types. Codecs are something that transcodes, recodes, or encodes a media file using it’s respective format, be it MP3, MP4, WMV, AVI, etc. Lastly, you’ll need some sort of network set up with the network media player and the server on that network. This will not work over the internet.
If you haven’t already started downloading Ubuntu, head on over to Ubuntu’s Home Page to download a copy. There are a variety of types and variety of ways to download Ubuntu. If you have a machine that’s a Core 2 Duo, Quad Core, Pentium Dual Core, or anything else that’s been made in the last 3-4 years, it’s probably a 64-bit processor, thus you’ll probably want to go with 64-bit Ubuntu Desktop. There are a lot of debates going on about the true advantage of 64-bit over 32-bit, but that’s a blog for a different day. If you have an older machine, such as a Pentium 4 or an Athlon XP, you’ll want to get the 32-bit version. Why Desktop you ask? Well it’s simple. First, I assume that you’re probably not proficient in Linux, and while some might argue that the best way to learn it is to jump in to server (no GUI, just command prompt), I figure I’ll be kind and give you something familiar. Next you get to search for ways to download this file. HTTP is the norm, but if you’re in to Torrenting and have a client, I suggest using that. It’s less strenuous on the Ubuntu servers and mirrors, plus, you’ll probably get the file faster.
Now you need a program to burn the ISO file. My personal favourite is MagicISO, but Roxio or Nero work just the same. Burn that file to a CD. If you got desktop, you’ll notice it’s a Live CD. This means that you can literally run the operating system off of the disc without it ever erasing files or touching the hard drive at all. It is the strong recommendation of BaerConsulting that you use a spare hard drive or one that contains no data that is valuable. If you don’t know what you’re doing, it’s probably best you don’t do it. Now, with that out of the way, and you being sure that you have a hard drive that you don’t mind wiping, let’s install Ubuntu.
Pop in the CD to your computer and boot it up. Select ‘Try Ubuntu without ant change to your computer’. Once it is booted up, you should be greeted with some peculiar sounds and a Desktop. Double click on ‘Install Ubuntu 9.10′. Select the appropriate language and click Forward. Select your appropriate Time Zone and click Forward. Select the appropriate keyboard layout and click Forward. On this screen you’ll see something similar to that of setting up Windows. This is where you partition your drive. For most users, using the default layout and simply clicking Forward will work best. WARNING: ONCE YOU CLICK FORWARD, ALL DATA ON YOUR DRIVE WILL BE LOST.. Pick you username, username again, type in your password, confirm it, and choose the name of this computer (otherwise known as hostname). Anything that autofills is probably safe. Once you’re sure about your settings, click Forward, then click Install. This can take up to 60 minutes depending on your system, so be patient. When it’s completely installed, go ahead and Restart Now. Take the disc out and close the tray, hit Enter as instructed by the splash screen.
When it boots back up, go ahead and log in based on the credentials you entered during the installation. Click on Applications>Accessories>Terminal. Type “sudo apt-get update”, hit enter, enter your password, hit enter. From here on, please assume that “hit enter” comes after every command. Once that’s completed, type “sudo apt-get upgrade”. When it prompts you, select yes. While it’s downloading updates, go back to Applications>Accessories and right click on Terminal. Click Add To Panel… This will put a shortcut icon on the top bar of your screen. This will give you quicker access to the terminal. It is the definitive administration tool under Linux. While the command is downloading and installing updates, go to System>Preferences>Remote Desktop. Click the “Allow other users to view your desktop” checkbox. Select the checkbox that says “Require the user to enter this password:” and enter a password. This will allow VNC remote access to this machine. This is where the hostname comes in handy, which you should see in the form of “username”@”hostname” in the terminal window at the beginning of the command prompt. Download Real, Tight, or Ultra VNC Viewer. That is quite simple, open it, enter the hostname, and click connect. If you’ve done everything right, you should be prompted for a password. Enter the password and you should now be seeing the Desktop of the Ubuntu machine. You can now put this machine in a remote location, provided the VNC connection worked, and remove the monitor, keyboard, mouse, etc. Just a network cable, a power cable, and of course, the machine itself.
After the update of Ubuntu, you should reboot and run those two commands again, just in case. We’re not dealing with Windows, so you’ll usually get all updates in one shot. Open up the terminal again. Enter “sudo apt-get install ssh”. This will install and SSH server so you can use an application like PUTTY for Windows to use the command line. If you’re proficient in command line, this will be very familiar to you.
Let’s open up terminal again, if it’s not already open. Type “sudo apt-get install mencoder ffmpeg mplayer vlc sun-java6-jre”. Note the spaces in between each application or package, as they’re referred to in Linux. Accept the license terms.
Go to PS3MediaServer.blogspot.com and download the newest Playstation Media Server. Choose to save to the Desktop. Right click and choose to extract here. There should be a new folder on the Desktop. Open up the terminal again and type “cd /home/[username]/Desktop/pm[tab]“. The tab key should autocomplete the folder as necessary. You should now be in the same folder as the files you just downloaded. Type “chmod +x PM[tab]“. Unlike Windows command line, Linux’s command line is case sensitive, so PM is not interpreted the same as pm. Then type “chmod +x linux/ts[tab]“. This makes the necessary files executable, just like a shortcut icon on the desktop of Windows.
With your mouse, go in to the folder that you just extracted to your Desktop. Double click on the PMS.sh file. If prompted, choose run in terminal. This should open up a new window. This is the main configuration console of the Playstation Media Server. This is where you can select the folders to be shared across the network. To add files to this server, you’ll need to set up Samba, which is a blog for another day. By default, the server shares all files and folders, which can be risky, but if you’re network is secure, it should be fine. Now that you have SSH set up, you could use Samba, or you could use WinSCP. For now, Google and download WinSCP. You’ll log in with the same username, password, and hostname that you entered during your initial setup of Ubuntu. Once logged in, you can see the layout of your local machine and the remote machine. Seeing as how Linux/Ubuntu is very secure operating system based mostly on permissions, you’ll want to put the files under /home/[username] on the Ubuntu machine. That will make them available to your media player. Also a note about permission; you’ll notice I used “sudo” quite a bit in the commands above. This stands for “superuserdo”. The superuser is the ultimate in permissions. It allows you to modify the system wherever you need to. Do NOT provide your password or any credentials to that machine to anyone you do not trust.
Why Playstation Media Server you ask? Because it plays mostly anything you like. As you can already guess, it is mostly compatible with the Playstation 3, but I have yet to meet anything that it will play on the Playstation 3 that you cannot play on the XBox 360 for example.
You now have a fully functional media server that can be detected by media players. You can also use this media server as anything else Ubuntu based that you like, such as a network grapher, network monitor, or a NAS. Again, you’ll probably want some extra storage on this machine. We’ll eventually post some instructions on setting up a NAS at a later time, but this should get you streaming your media files in the meantime.
Back to weekly tips and new development project
by BaerConsultLLC on Jan.12, 2010, under News
Well, the Bears’ season is over and we’re back to maintaining the blog. We’ve had some interesting developments as far as projects and news for BaerConsulting. First, we will soon be posting a great way to turn an old computer in to a network media server and using it as a media storage server. The best part of that is that it is completely free of charge. The software will not cost you a penny. Depending on the age of the computer, you may want to consider adding or replacing the hard drive in the machine, however.
Secondly, BaerConsult will soon start developing applications for the Android platform. If you are unfamiliar with Android, it is an open source operating system made by Google. They have geared this OS towards mobile platforms for the time being but have been in negotiations with Netbook manufacturers and have already started prototypes for Netbook tablets with Android running on them. For reference, Android is known as the iPhone killer. It will crush the iPhone. Originally, the G1 made by HTC was really the only phone running Android and it was only available on the T-Mobile network. However, HTC followed up with the MyTouch, also only available with T-Mobile. Soon after, the first non T-Mobile Android devices were made publicly available on other networks such as Verizon, Sprint, and AT&T as well. Since Novemeber, Verizon’s/Motorola’s DROID (A855) has sold over 500,000 units. The first 300,000 were sold in the first 2 weeks of retail availability. What makes this platform so interesting is that Google spent quite a bit of time making it the fastest and most stable OS available on smartphones to date. My DROID boots in about 1/10 the time it took my Blackberry Storm to boot. It really is the best platform available. If you own an Android phone, make sure to look for us in the marketplace under BaerConsultLLC for the developer name. Our first project is still being kept quiet at the moment, but it will hopefully hit public beta in the coming months.
Tip of the Week
by BaerConsultLLC on Sep.30, 2009, under Tip of the Week
First, we’d like to apologize for not keeping up with the Tip of the Week category. It’s football season and we made the grand mistake of putting them out on Monday nights. We’ll try to keep up to date with them from here on out….it just may not always be Monday nights.
This week, we’d like to talk a little about wireless keyboards and mice. There are a lot of mixed reviews out there pertaining to these technological wonders and a lot of them are not praise. We’ve run across many sets of wireless keyboards and mice and think that there’s no sure fire way to tell whether the one you’re buying is worth the money you’ll be spending on it. We ran across a $200 pair made by Logitech a few years back that was absolutely horrible. It simply wouldn’t stay connected to the computer. When it was connected, dropped keys and loss of mouse movements was evident and unbearable. However, we’ve since owned a few wireless Logitech wireless mice that performed like a dream. The current pick is a Logitech Performance Laser Mouse. Not sure of the model number as it’s not printed on the mouse (odd) but it’s widely available, very compact, and phenomenal battery life. We also have numerous sets of Microsoft Laser Keyboard/Mouse combos that have yet to catastrophically fail on us. This particular set uses laser technology as well, there seems to be a trend developing here. We’re partial to laser because it tends to play well with WiFi and Bluetooth. Bluetooth pairing is not fun and it’s something you’ll have to do countless times with Bluetooth keyboards and mice.
We’re hoping someone will make a type of WiFi keyboard and mouse combo that works with client software. It’s a little radical, but could you imagine sitting in your family room with your keyboard and mouse and controlling your computer on your TV? It will be one of the next steps in the evolution of computers.
The true tip here is to read reviews. Listening to other peoples’ experiences with the product you’re considering is one of the best ways to see if the product suits your needs. Stay away from review SPAM though. Review SPAM is when someone takes the features of a product and spins them to their unique situation. For example, someone stating “The mouse is uncomfortable” is a good example. This is an opinion, not a fact about the mouse. Someone saying that the battery life is awesome or that it sucks is not review SPAM, this is something that can be proven and is very rarely an opinion.
Website Additions
by BaerConsultLLC on Sep.15, 2009, under News, Website Additions
We’ve swapped around the home page a bit. Gave higher priority to the promotions as they are the most important item on the home page. We moved some information to the contact us page. And replaced the old promotion with a new one! 50% off your first 6 months of a 24 month contract. That should bring in some new clients and help stimulate the economy!
Tip of the Week
by BaerConsultLLC on Sep.01, 2009, under Tip of the Week
As computer technology evolves, so will cellular phone technology. Most of us can remember back in the old days of analog phones where the only screen you had was a small strip that gave you 6 bars indicating reception. It’s hard to believe we’ve come so far in 15-20 years. The cellular phone you have now is probably pretty close in specifications of the computer you had at the time of analog phones.
Processors and memory are getting smaller, thus, you end up with Smartphones. Blackberries, Windows Mobile devices, Palm OS, iPhone, etc. When thinking about purchasing one of these, one must take in to consideration the network that it will run on. You may have a computer that could rival NASA but is it really worth it if you have dialup? As a company, we’re partial to CDMA technology, primarily Verizon. There’s just something about GSM (T-mobile and AT&T) that just don’t work well for coverage, signal, and general performance of the network. Of course, that is dependent on where you will be primarily using the phone. If we rule out AT&T and T-mobile as options, you automatically rule out the G1 from Google and the iPhone from Apple (which rumor has it, Verizon will soon be getting an Apple phone but they cannot call it the iPhone for copyright reasons). Sprint is also one of those networks that just don’t work very well. That statement can be considered true mostly anywhere as we’ve never heard a good thing about Sprint. Their customer service is horrible, their network is unreliable, and their selection of phones is pretty bad. We’ve just ruled out the Palm Pre. Verizon’s selection is pretty nice and they do have some exclusive rights to some of the phones that are out now. The Blackberry Storm is a pretty decent phone if you’re in to the touch screen features and you’re willing to void your warranty with software updates that aren’t technically supposed to be out yet. They also have the new Blackberry Tour. They also have one of the best networks in the country. Our favorite by far.
When purchasing a new phone, you essentially can pick from 4 different options as far as operating systems go: Windows Mobile, Blackberry OS, Apple (which is based on OSX), and Palm OS. Out of these, we’d have to say it’s a toss up between Blackberry OS and Apple for the best of the best. Blackberry OS does tend to get bogged down and glitch here and there, but doesn’t ever seem to crash, while Apple has the opposite problem, it runs well, but has a tendency to crash from time to time. Windows Mobile has a lot of flaws particularly when it comes to speed. It seems a bit too bulky for the hardware it’s running on (Vista anyone?). Palm OS seems to be pretty decent looking and have heard reports that it has some issues with bugs, but that can be expected with any new OS. The Palm Pre is the first device to run Palm’s new operating system and, as with any new software, the bugs must be worked out. However, we have not had the opportunity to play with the Palm Pre, so we can not offer an objective opinion on the phone’s capabilities.
Just keep in mind that the coolest phone may be worth nothing more than a hockey puck on the wrong network.
Edit:
A gentleman kindly pointed out that I forgot to mention Google Android. This is yet another OS that is in its infancy. Google is making a wise move by trying to get Android running on phones under other networks, but it currently resides on one of the worst networks in the country, T-Mobile. Thus, it is still not one of the top contenders.
Nagios
by BaerConsultLLC on Aug.25, 2009, under News, Server Configuration
Oooo such a dirty word. In all actuality, Nagios is only intimidating. Once you find the right walkthrough and decide for or against compiling from source, you’re already through most of the battle. We decided that a free Windows based monitoring system that had device and probe limitations just wasn’t going to cut it anymore. Since we have a very beautiful 5TB total available storage NAS with a dual-core processor and 2GB of RAM sitting there just storing data, we figure we might as well use it for some monitoring. We went through Zabbix and determined that it was going to take longer to get it set up than most of the server would even be in production. Not to mention SNMP based monitoring of system resources can be a security risk as well as difficult to troubleshoot. Nagios has a very comprehensive support base out there. It has been customized and modified to do just about anything that is desired, so we opted for Nagios.
As previously stated, the NAS is a Ubuntu 9.04 desktop with the hardware specs above. Luckily, Nagios and most plugin packages are in the repositories, meaning that can be downloaded and install using your favorite package manager, on Ubuntu, by default, it’s apt. From there, it’s quite simple to figure out how to monitor things. We did print outs of all the commands that were available in the /etc/nagios-plugins directory with (while in /etc/nagios-plugins) ‘cat *.cfg > all.txt’. Marked each one that we’d like to use and started making our host .cfg files. Whenever you make a change to the Nagios configuration files (any of them), you have to restart Nagios for the change to take effect. This is where Nagios can get somewhat tedious. We highly recommend doing one host at a time. Do a few hosts one at a time, restarting after each one. When Nagios catches an error, it won’t restart successfully and it will usually tell you why. Go back in to the config file and make the necessary changes. Once you’ve mastered hosts, you should start adding services to the host files. You can do your file structure however you like. We used one .cfg file for the mail server, one for the web server, so on and so forth. This way, if you take that server out of production, you can just remove the file or move it to another file with another extension. Also, if something goes wrong, you’ll know exactly where to start looking.
Also, there is a Nagios ‘agent’ called NRPE that is used to monitor system resources on the local machine and sends them back to Nagios. The nice thing is that NRPE uses one single port and utilizes SSL so it’s pretty secure. Those commands are defined in the nrpe.cfg file. We have ours running under xinetd which means we can modify commands as much as we want without having to restart NRPE, although you will have to restart Nagios when you add your check_nrpe command. It’s basically a beefier version of SNMP. We’ve only had one hiccup where NRPE failed SSL handshakes for about an hour, but we believe it was due to an NTP misconfiguration. Time is very important when dealing with secure connections. Right now, we’re experimenting with adding some extensive Zimbra monitoring utilizing NRPE. We just altered some perl paths to get Nagios monitoring the postfix mail queue on the Zimbra server, letting us know whenever it reaches a certain point. This tells us that it is possible to do some very interesting things with Nagios. We’ll post the most interesting parts.
We have not and will not post anything pertaining to the actual set up of Nagios such as a walkthrough. Honestly, it took about 15-25 hours to get it successfully monitoring 52 different services, but that includes setting up NSClient++ (basically NRPE for Windows), NRPE on the Mail Server (CentOS) and the Web Server (Ubuntu), importing all publicly available and privately available services such as POP, SMTP, IMAP, HTTP, etc., public IP addresses, private IP addresses, and domains. We went through and used at least a dozen walkthroughs. At some point, we may set up an additional box just to do the walkthrough, but don’t hold your breath. Nagios documentation is pretty thorough. Google NRPE documentation in order to find the best document for the job. It’s posted by Nagios but couldn’t be readily found on the site. Nagios mailing lists are great resources when all else fails. Also, don’t forget your notification profiles. IT IS HIGHLY ADVISED THAT YOU USE THE ‘NEVER’ NOTIFICATION PROFILE OR CREATE ONE IF YOUR SPECIFIC INSTALL DOESN’T HAVE ONE ON EACH AND EVERY HOST/SERVICE UNTIL IT IS UP, RUNNING, AND STABLE. I’D SAY ONCE EVERYTHING IS GREEN, LET IT RUN FOR A WEEK, THEN YOU’LL KNOW YOU CAN TURN ON NOTIFICATIONS. OTHERWISE, YOUR INBOX WILL FILL QUICKLY WHILE YOU WORK OUT THE BUGS.
Tip of the Week
by BaerConsultLLC on Aug.25, 2009, under Tip of the Week
This weeks tip is about web hosting. When doing any sort of web hosting, it’s important to remember that the web pages themselves are typically compatible with any web server such as Apache, IIS, etc. Some may require plug ins to be compatible with languages such as CGI and PHP but the code can be read by any HTTP server. Our personal preference is Apache2 on either Ubuntu or CentOS with virtual hosting. Our very first blog post was about configuring a virtual host on Ubuntu 8.04 with Apache2. It may take a little bit of configuring and quite a bit of frustration, but once you get all of the tumblers to sit just right, that lock will open up and run for a very long time. Just goes to show you that the simpler router, may not always be what is best in the long run.
Tip of the Week
by BaerConsultLLC on Aug.12, 2009, under Tip of the Week
When entering any sensitive information in to a website, take a second to check the URL for the preceding “https://”, this signifies that the site is secure and, for the most part, your information will be kept private and confidential, a must have for those doing online shopping.
The ’s’ at the end stands for…can anyone guess? Secure! This means that the site is using an encryption algorithm to protect everything that you’re doing on that particular page. Most typically SSL, it scrambles your data so that only the receiving computer can read it. If you’ve ever visited a site, entered your credit card number, and then went to fill in another form on another website and a little box pops up below that text field with your credit card number in it, then you’ve visited and paid for items in an insecure manner. Anyone with a laptop and some ingenuity could have just grabbed your credit card number and put you so far in to debt, you’re dog will get repossessed.
Also, when shopping online, please use common sense. If the site is poorly constructed or just doesn’t look professional, do some research on the merchant. Things that should set off alarms in your head:
- Abundance of typos. A real website that is legitimate will have every single person they can find proofread that site for errors.
- Grammar mistakes. Read the description above.
- International sellers. Basically, stay away from merchants in Africa. Chinese merchants are also becoming more and more suspicious.
- Non HTTPS sites. Shopping from a non-HTTPS site is similar to mailing cash.
You wouldn’t give your credit card number to a hobo, don’t give it to a suspicious website. Google is your friend, do some research on the company, or a $25 item could end up costing you thousands of dollars.
Tip of the Week
by BaerConsultLLC on Aug.03, 2009, under Tip of the Week
Money, it’s what makes the world function these days. The old saying “you get what you pay for” doesn’t apply to every situation, but it’s typically true when it comes to computers. Sure, Ubuntu is free, which is great, but you will have many more obstacles when getting to a stable, reliable machine. Hardware is no exception. If you want a rocket ship, then build/buy one, but don’t buy cheap parts for it. Don’t sacrifice quality for money. If it will cost an additional $200 to get the name brand item, then splurge and buy the name brand item. Usually, you’ll get caught up in trying to save money, you sacrifice more on quality, which you will be paying for later. When buying/building a computer, just remember, “you get what you pay for”!
