Server running

The home server is up and running for a couple of weeks now, so time for an update. I use Windows Home Server as the operating system. It's easy to use and helps with a couple of server essentials. The nice thing about WHS is that it manages the available harddisk space as a single large network drive. As a user you only see one network drive, regardless of how many physical drives the server has. Then for each individual share folder, you can set WHS up to duplicate the folder. The folders with this setting can always be recovered after a harddisk crash. Apart from that, WHS takes care of various types of remote access functionality. Unfortunately, my pc's with Windows XP Home edition can't be controlled remotely.

MediaPortal TV server is running and I have a working client on my desktop. Unfortunately the analogue cable signal appears to be too weak after the extensions I had to make to reach the home server, so I'll have to do some tweaking there. As a webinterface for the tv guide and scheduling of recordings, I use For the Record.
The server is running a couple of other web services. Whiist is taking care of the pictures and the links on the homeserver front page. Whiist has a very simple user interface and makes setting up a photo webpage incredibly simple.
For downloading goodies I gave up torrents and moved to usenet. The client I use is SABnzbd. It runs on the server and also provides a great webinterface, so I can manage my downloads from anywhere. It can even move the downloads to the proper folder based on the type of content.
WebGuide makes the full MP3 collection available through the internet. It offers streaming as well as downloads and has a very flashy user interface. As a minor hurdle, it's based completely off the Windows Media Player library, which isn't very easy to maintain.

My weather in MediaPortal

Since a transfer to MediaPortal 1.0 requires a fresh new install, I'm revisiting a lot of settings that I haven't touched in a while. Among which the maps for My Weather. With many websites using unsupported formats for their weather maps, finding images that My Weather can display is a challenge. For instance, the .png files that are used by the dutch KNMI website and many other weather sites are not supported. But I found a number of close matches:

Satellite: http://www.sat24.com/images.php?country=nl
Temperature: http://www.teleweer.nl/common/data/nl_middag2.gif
UV Index: http://www.knmi.nl/waarschuwingen_en_verwachtingen/images/zonkracht/zonkracht_kaartje_dag0.gif
Winds: http://db.eurad.uni-koeln.de/prognose/data/aktuell/sto_cen_1h_movd0.gif
Humidity: http://icons-pe.wunderground.com/data/640x480/2xeu_rh.gif
Precipitation: http://www3.buienradar.nl/images.aspx?jaar=-3&soort=sp-loop

This also gave me an opportunity to make my first ever contribution to the MediaPortal wiki.

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.