I discussed this concept with Liz last night and she thought it was a great idea!
I plan to implement it in several phases and I think the kicker was that Phase I is essentially free.
Phase I is to get music into the kitchen again. There are speakers in the kitchen that used to be hooked up to the stereo in the living room. They got unhooked when I finished up the living room walls and now it’s a pain to re-route the wires to the stereo, so it just didn’t get done.
But I have another power amp and I’m going to take the tuner out of the living room (since we never listen to the radio in the living room and Liz likes to listen to the radio in the kitchen) and build a shelf to put them on and hook them up to the speakers in the kitchen.
Then we will at least have a decent radio in the kitchen. Plus I should be able to wrangle a CD player for cheap or free somewhere. Or we could use my iPod shuffle, but I don’t think Liz would like most of the music I put on it. 🙂
Liz also talked about having a computer in the kitchen (!) – something I had not expected at all, so maybe we could figure out how to make that work as the music player there. I don’t expect that to happen until we redo the kitchen (and who knows when that will happen) as there really isn’t anywhere to put a computer right now.
Phase II will involve spending some money to buy some Network Media Players. One of the cool things about that is that I can buy them one at a time when we have the money. Plus I could buy one to have music in the bedroom, etc. Anywhere there is network available – or I could go the wireless route, depending on what I buy.
I also played with Openfiler a bit last night. That’s going to take some mucking about with to get it fully sussed out. It requires an authentication server of some sort (LDAP, NT Domain, etc) for user permissions, so I finally need to figure out how to make my Samba server a PDC. I started playing with that last night, but the O’Reilly book I have is confusing (how atypical) and appears to be a slap-dash update for Samba 3.0, so it’s full of version 2.2 stuff that doesn’t work.
I was getting frustrated, and I had to chivvy Rosalyn into finishing her homework instead of AIMing her firends, so I stopped.
My coworker just dumped a box with five 80GB hard drives, a RAID card and a pair of 350MHz PII CPUs on my desk, so I should be able to get the filer up this weekend! Whee!
The chassis he gave me last night had two mis-matched CPUs in it – one 333MHz and one 300MHz. He said that it had been running fine for him, but Openfiler didn’t seem to like it very much. If I booted the SMP kernel, it would kernel panic. If I booted the single CPU kernel, it would hang on the Kudzu hardware detection.
So I pulled the 300Mhz CPU and booted the single-CPU kernel and it seemed to be just fine.
