BieRHeDD

One of my connections is with internode so i've had a bit of usenet experience through that. It's only a low quota plan though because it's not primarily for downloading stuff. They basically provide i dunno what you'd call it.. maybe "proxy/peering" access to giganews servers in the US. With TPG you'd need to buy your own account with giganews/astraweb/rapidshare/useneXt .. etc etc etc. There're probably a million of them to choose from.

As far as i know (i'm a virtualisation n00b too) ESXi won't share your PCI tuner card with the VMs. I've only used VMWare Server 2.x to any extensive degree (ESXi gives me hardware compatibility headaches). I'm confident your idea would work with VMWare Server 2.x *if* you used a USB based tuner instead of PCI. That's all i can offer. Surely someone else has tried your idea though and will eventually give you an idea from their experience. Maybe this sort of virtualised home media centre server setup could be covered in one of Matt's virtualisation segments. ?? :D

Usenet doesn't get much attention in Oz as far as the media goes. It's p2p that has the attention of a certain Federal Minister. It would be good to keep it that way so he doesn't get some half assed idea about filtering it. As far as the user experience goes torrents and usenet are very similar (with a good client app). Usenet uses .nzb files instead of .torrent files. And usenet "binaries" are stored on centralised servers instead of the whole p2p web type structure where leechers also act as seeders. As far as using usenet, you basically pay in $$ instead of seeding in MB. Pay $$ to the server providers (eg giganews) for different levels of access. A few ISPs here do provide usenet access standard with their DSL plans. Internode and Netspace that i know of, probably more. Of course you can just use any ISP and buy your own giganews access. A high quota tpg plan and a big giganews account would be hard (maybe impossible) to beat here as far as bang for buck goes. So bottom line is your paying for access, can download generally at full speed (depending on your ISP and the whole state of their network, tpg run "at their networks limit" let's say), and there is no upstream(seeding) as its not p2p. Any more information than that and this post could be taken by some people as promoting copyright infringement. Which it isn't. So let google do the rest for you. Whatever you may want to download. Linux .ISOs i assume ;)

etc I was thinking wine+utorrent sounded pretty horrible but didnt want to start a client war :P. I've used azureus (Vuze?) up until now. It runs well on ubuntu and can be installed as easy as #apt-get install vuze. I'll try out torrentflux though, especially if it runs headless with an html interface :) SABnzbd also sounds good. I don't have a big usenet quota so haven't bothered doing much research into the best client. I'll check it out too. Now gotta go watch s5e17!

etc Looks like a good setup. I use the WD 1TB blacks in my setup and they are awesome (6x drives, 4TB raid5 with one hot spare) I'll probably grow it to 5TB and lose the hot spare when i need the space. I know you're getting the RAID card so this may not be relevant but just in case you're interested i've only ever used linux software raid and usually setup four partitions on each drive: 100MB /boot (/boot2, /boot3 etc for remaining drives each one set as bootable and grubbed after install) 2GB swap per drive 20GB linux autodetect software raid remaining (ie 900+GB) linux autodetect software raid all the 20GB partitions get put into a raid1 or raid5 for the OS (ie /) all the 900+GB partitions get put into a raid 5 or raid 6 volume for my storage (ie. /mnt/storage) this way i don't need a separate drive for the OS, and if a drive falls off the array it's easy enough to boot up off one of the "backup" /boot partitions to get mdadm into action to remove/add a freshly partitioned drive. Add to this fast swap space across multiple drives if your RAM fills up. It's worked very well for me and I move files at about 80MB/s between machines on the network using NFS. Of course the hardware raid card should be awesome and allow hotswap for failed drives but check if it has linux management software to make the most of it's features, a lot of them i've only seen windows software(drivers?) mentioned in their blurb but like i said i haven't used one so i could be completely in the dark about this. If you want to use GNOME just download the *alternate* version of the ubuntu install .iso. (alternate lets you play with software raid during the install process). If you're going to use gnome i can't see any advantage to downloading the *server* .iso as its designed for no gui. Anyway it sounds like you've got it under control. I don't want this to sound like a lecture, i'm just annoyed after a week of trying to get that GA-EX58-UD5 to work how i want and failing. May as well give you forewarning since you mentioned this exact board :D. Until the kernel catches up with these 8111's i'm using this massive case and an i7 with 12gig of ram for my desktop.. pretty stupid hey. Cheers, BieRHeDD

Hi, I did a similar upgrade last week. I use the server to also run a few virtual machines (vmware server 2) as well as SMB and NFS. Let me start by saying that if you use NFS for your fileshares that the GA-EX58-UD5 uses two Realtek 8111D chips for its onboard dual LAN. And the linux kernel doesn't play well with this chip currently (apparently a fix is in store for kernel 2.6.30 but that is cutting edge and even when i compiled it myself (rc8) it still didn't quite work. The problem was the motherboard basically does a hard reset randomly during a heavy load NFS<-->RAID operation. Sometimes I could get 10gig+ transferred before it would reboot but other times much smaller.This is obviously not ideal when you're talking multi gigabyte raid volumes that need to resync / fsck after each random reboot. This problem had me trying different distros (with different kernels) for a full week but each one ended up the same. In the end i relegated the i7 to be my desktop machine, and now iuse my E8500/8gig/ASUS-P5E-VM-HDMI box as the server which has worked flawlessly using ubuntu 8.04.2 server (no gui). My advice to you would be to use your current machine if you only want it for filesharing. If you have a small case, buy a big one. Check out Lian-Li PC-A77 or PC-343. (I got the A77) then as you have on your list a 4 or 8 port hardware RAID card that is capable of SAS and using expanders. I was looking at an Adaptec ASA1405 (up to 128 drives with expanders). Of course check your current motherboard has a PCIe 4x or above slot free to house the card. Bottom line is unless you want to use Windows then the currently available 1366 motherboards all seem to have realtek 8111 LANs. (well the good ones) So you may run into the same problems as I had. Good luck with it. Cheers, BieRHeDD