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Browsing Posts in Ubuntu

The Problem
After about a year of enjoying how well my Ubuntu Linux home server downloads, organizes, and serves video files to my TV, I started to think harder about serving up music to devices around the house, and to my phone and/or PC while I’m at work. In the past, I’ve made my music library [...]

IBM just published a great article that describes how to manage Linux file permissions and ownership. That’s a very important topic for managing any server, and is very important in my Transmission-Daemon setup tutorial. This article is one of the most complete and well-written I have come across. Its command line examples are based on Fedora, but [...]

Sick Beard is a (terribly, terribly named) application that downloads TV episodes from newsgroups—as opposed to BitTorrent—moves and renames them, and even fetches artwork and episode information (.NFO files) for use with XBMC. If, for any reason, you want to avoid BitTorrent and go with newsgroups instead, go aheard and install SABnzb+ for downloading purposes, [...]

Even though my Ubuntu Lucid Lynx media server runs pretty solidly, I like to monitor it periodically using SSH and command line tools. Some of my favorites are w, htop, ps, bwm-ng, and nmap. After rebuilding my server, I decided to install some lightweight system monitoring tools that exposed themselves via a web interface, so [...]

This is a simple script I wrote to perform one-way sync to mirror my server’s media folder on my WD TV LIVE‘s external hard drive. I have to run such a script because the wifi-N signal in my TV cabinet is not sufficient to stream HD video, and the WD TV LIVE doesn’t appear to [...]

Note: These instructions are an update of a previous post. I updated my instructions to include the download of the transmissionrpc plugin, and to include the cron job definition I use. These instructions apply to FlexGet 1.0r1377.
When I read posts on LifeHacker and Gizmodo sometimes, I figure that everybody else in the world is downloading [...]

Using the configuration file shown in my Transmission-Daemon setup post, Transmission will download files into the “downloading” folder until the download hits 100%. At that point, the downloaded files will be moved to the “seeding” folder. The torrent will remain active, seeding to other users, until it hits the seeding ratio, or until you pause [...]

Note: This article is an update to the Transmission daemon install instructions which reflects what I did when I rebuilt my media server. I now show the location of the configuration file in the “normal” place, /etc/transmission-daemon/, which did not work for me originally, but worked for me after a fresh install. I also improved [...]

I prefer to use Samba shares to serve my media files to my front-end player, the WD TV Live. That said, not all front-ends work with Samba shares; my TV and my iPod Touch come to mind as products that work with media servers, not with file shares. There are several media servers on the [...]