Network troubleshooting

With the server hardware up and running, there is plenty of troubleshooting to do. My network now consists of a server and two client pc's, connected by 100Mbps ethernet and a router that I use a switch. The router is also connected to an ADSL modem that's also a router.

First of all, the network was behaving weird. Even though all three pc's had the same workgroup name specified, not all of the pc's were showing up when browsing the workgroup node in Windows explorer. Upon further research I found out that "ping" worked for the ip addresses of the pc's, but not always for the computer names. Eventually I learned that without a WINS server on my network, NetBIOS name resolution didn't work properly. I was able to solve this by creating LMHOSTS lookup files on all of the pc's.

Another problem, that I originally linked to the network problem, was very slow file transfers to and from the Media Center PC. When copying a bigger file, the CPU usage went up to nearly 100% while the network usage remained at less than 25%. Over a 100 Mbps network, that equals about 3MB/s, while the harddisk is capable of 133 MB/s (UltraDMA 6). Only after I solved the network problem did I find out that this even occurred while copying files locally on the Media Center PC. First I tried all sorts of driver updates for motherboard and hard disk. After running a Samsung hard disk self diagnostics program and trying the disk in an external drive case, I came to the conclusion that the disk was fine. A forum post directed me to look at the IDE channel transfer mode in the device manager. It appears that Windows XP sets this transfer mode back to PIO indefinitely, after six DMA failures. This PIO transfer mode was the culprit for my high CPU load and low transfer rates. Getting it back to DMA mode requires an uninstall of the IDE driver. Windows XP automatically reinstalls it at the next reboot.

The good thing from all of this is that the Samsung hard disk utility enabled me to set the UltraDMA mode from the default 5 to the maximum of 6. That improves the theoretical transfer rate of the harddisk from 100 to 133 MB/s at no cost.

Home Server Hardware

The hardware for my Home Server/ TV Server is in!

CPU: Intel Celeron 440 2.0GHz, 800MHz FSB
Mobo: Gigabyte EP35-DS3, Intel P35 Chipset, ATX
Harddisk: Samsung SpinPoint F1 750GB, SATAII
Memory: Kingston Dimm 1GB DDR2 PC2-6400
Case: Cooler Master Centurion 5
OS: Windows Home Server UK

To be supplemented by some re-use components:
Power Supply 250W
2 Hauppauge analogue TV cards
Maxtor 160GB harddisk

Last.fm

In the battle between the music communities Last.fm and Pandora, the choice is obvious in Europe: Since Pandora had to block service to anyone outside the Land of the Free in May 2007, the prize went to Last.fm.

Wikipedia gives a decent explanation of what Last.fm is and what it does, so I won't repeat that here. This month, Last.fm released a new web layout with a number of improvements. The Last.fm blog visitors are raising hell about the layout, but it has actually improved. With so many links and information, the pages used to have a tendency to get cluttered up. The new interface does a better job at that.

Now, about the auto-dj capabilities. I like to play my local music and not be dependent on the quality of the streams that Last.fm provides. The plugin available for MediaMonkey is trash. It's based completely off of Last.fm's recommendations. Typically, the recommendations are songs that the user hasn't played, so there's a big chance the recommendations aren't present in the local collection. The plugin fails to find a hit and defaults back to a favorite.

The MediaPortal plugin seems to do a better job. It really looks for songs similar to the songs played. Just playing "Hunting high and low" by A-ha results in a true 80s playlist, while "Ruby" by the Kaiser Chiefs gets me a playlist with recent Brit pop. Unfortunately, after a while some artists are played more and more often.

Part of the problem is that the auto-dj's use queries from last fm, but Last.fm doesn't really support the auto dj plugins. With all the data gathered by Last.fm, it should be possible to make a better guess of what song I want to hear next. I'd expect a setup page for configuring auto dj preferences integrated in Last.fm.

What I end up doing is just go to Last.fm, pick an artist and play the Music like... stream. Great fun, but anyone can do that, even if you don't have a profile at all. And then, what's the point in uploading data about every song I play?