Ben Hovinga

So up until yesterday I have been using my laptop (with Boxee Media Center installed) connected to my TV via HDMI for watching my movies. This was a pain in the butt if say my mom wanted to watch a movie but I needed my laptop for work (aka play games). So set out to find a way to for my mom to watch her movies an I can still use my laptop. The result a laptop (other laptop) server.

I could have put together a bunch of parts from old broken down systems that I have sitting in the basement to make a cheap tower server that would be loud and take up a bunch of space. But that was just the problem. I don’t have much space for it and my parents would complain about the noise, trust me I have tried. Then there would be the issue of network wires to get to the server.

I remembered that I had a old laptop that nobody would use. In fact it was so old it wouldn’t be the effort to sell. Just clean it up with a new OS and install some software, it was perfect.

Now it is small, it is quiet, it has WiFi and built in battery backup. I can store this thing almost anywhere. Under or behind a couch, under a bed, behind the TV, strapped to the underside of a table behind your current computer. The options go on and on.

My Setup

• Old acer laptop that took 5 minutes to load Windows
• External 320 GB HDD
• xubuntu
• wine
• utorrent (with web gui enabled)
• PS3 media server (because I have a PS3 connected to my TV)
• SSH

I hid mine behind the couch and also decided to put the rest of the network gear there so I can free up some space on my desk.

My hidden network

With the couch pulled out you can see my network. On the left is the laptop server with the external drive in front then the wireless router, modem, and power bar. I decided to wire the laptop up direct with the router since it was right there, this way I don’t have any loss in performance because I am going to be using it for media. Also because this laptop gets hot fast I tilted it against the wall so more air can get to the vents in the bottom. I am considering removing the bottom cover for even more coolness.

I can easily log into the torrent web gui to add movies, it will automatically download and add them to the media directory. And if I am having any problems I don’t need to pull the couch out to fix it. I can just use Putty and login to the server via SSH.

UPDATE – Feb 6 [7:53 AM]

I just wanted to add in here that my media server failed. I ran into a lot of software problems and just decided to can the whole thing, plus the laptop was really slow and took some time to turn on. The idea of a laptop server is still a very good one, its just that I’m not very good with Linux yet. Maybe in the future if I have a better laptop and the proper software I will attempt this project again.

For now I just formated that external hard drive to Fat32, made the correct folders, copied my movies, and plugged it in directly to the Playstation (details). At least this way I don’t need to worry about network lag while watching a movie, and I can also have my photos and music on it too. Only downside is I need to connect my laptop to the hard drive any time I want to add a new movie, but at least its only a 30 second transfer and I can watch it in full HD.