Reducing Wires

Recently got an additional monitor for my workstation@home and found that the following wires were indispensable:

• USB Mouse
• Monitor VGA / HDMI / DVI cable
• USB Hub cable (Pen Drive etc.)

I was lucky that this ($20 + used) Dell monitor was an awesome buy since it came with a Monitor USB Hub (besides other goodies such as vertical rotate etc).

After a bit of rejigging, this is how things finally panned-out:

• 1 USB Wire (from the laptop) for the MUH (Monitor USB Hub)
• This is usually something like this.
• Use a USB->DVI converter and use that to connect MUH -> Monitor DVI port
• This is usually something like this.
• Plug USB Mouse to MUH
• With things working so well, I also plugged a Wireless Touchpad dongle to the MUH

So now when I need to do some office work, connecting 1 USB wire gets me up and running!

#LoveOneWires :)

Now only if I could find a stable / foolproof Wireless solution here ;)

Using Pi as an home-based Media Server

This is among a series of articles on my experience with the Pi.

This article is about using a Pi as a primitive low-end File-Server for your home network:

Expectations:

• Torrent-Server
• Download Torrents
• Store on a File-Share
• Windows Share
• Serve the File-Share as a Windows Share Drive
• Allow Read / Write to this Windows Share Drive
• Use File-Share as Media-Server
• Using any Smartphone / Laptop
• Play Movies using VLC
• View all Photos / Home-Videos

Effectively:

1. Always on
1. Always accepting new Torrent requests
2. Instantly start downloading 
2. In Real-time
1. Allow user's to view torrent download status
3. Use any UPnP Phone App to play Video content over WiFi on a SmartPhone
4. Use VLC (Network Streaming) to play any Video over WiFi on Laptop / Desktop
5. Use Windows Share Drive and view all Photos / Home-Videos as needed

How-To:

• On Server
• Install Torrent-Daemon
• Configure Torrent-Daemon to listen on RPC requests
• Here's the howto for that
• Configure Samba
• Set the Download folder to be shared
• On Windows
• Install Transmission-GUI-Remote
• Desktop / Smartphone
• Configure GUI to use the RPC based Torrent-Daemon server
• Make this application the default for .torrent & magnet files
• On Linux
• Install Transmission-Remote
• sudo apt-get install transmission-remote
• Configure that to use Daemon (instead of downloading directly with transmission-cli)

Pros/Cons:

• Pros
• Once torrent download has begun, client can disconnect / shutdown client computer
• Server continues to get torrents, after a restart
• miniDLNA serving speed pretty decent
• Watching a movie (over WiFi) on VLC
• CPU ratio barely 0.01 which is pretty decent
• Should be able to easily serve a small army :)
• If no other IO is happening
• If WiFi isn't the bottleneck 
• Cons
• Storage on Pi needs to be managed from time-to-time
• Currently is highly adhoc based
• Truly taking RAID concept to heart!!
• Have 6 Pen Drives (ranging from 4GB to 16GB)
• 8GBs are INR ~170 ( $3 )
• All connected via 3 USB Hubs (both USB 2.0 and USB 3.0)
• One Powered, two non-powered hubs
• Most on Btrfs
• Pretty stable, surprising that still get 1+ MBps with Pi's CPU
• Some VFAT fs since have need of moving stuff off of Pi to a Windows Laptop
• All mounted under /disk
• Very temporary arrangement
• Ideally am looking for a LVM solution (which allows me to remove / add pen-drives on the fly and thus can be called as one) that actually is suited for this purpose.
• But miniDLNA picks up Photo / Audio / Video pretty well from all different mounted folders
• Download speed limitations
• Internet Speed = 2 MBps
• Daemon Download speed capping = 1Mbps
• But PI never reaches it :D !
• Just imagine the poor configuration
• Pi + Btrfs + USB 2.0 + 3 USB Chain + Unpowered Hub
• Still consistent at 450kbps! Impressive!
• Lack of Transmission-Daemon configuration tool means all configuration has to be done via black-screen configuration files
• Careful configuration
• Give all access to 'all' users only if you're sure that all users are going to be careful