Lou Jacob's blog

Installing the Squeezebox Server on the MediaSmart Server

I recently decided to give the Squeezebox Server on my MediaSmart EX495. If you are not familiar with any of the Squeezebox products, they are worth looking at if you'd like to have a device that can connect to your stereo and your network, and play your audio files from a centralized file repository. Squeeze products were originally developed and marketed by a company named Slim Devices, however Slim Devices was purchased by Logitech in 2006.

Adding Storage for Capacity and Redundancy

So, today I decided it was time to add a few drives to my EX495, just to see how it easy it was, expand the capacity, and more importantly, ensure that I had some redundancy in the case of a drive failure.

Remote Access to My MediaSmart Server

As I mentioned in my 2nd article (Part 2 of Setting IUp my MediaSmart EX495), one other aspect of getting rid of the "network critical" warning on my Home Server Console dashboard was to enable remote access. As I said before,

Setting Up My MediaSmart EX495 (part 2 of 2)

To recap my experience from Part 1, I had some difficulties getting rid of the NETWORK CRITICAL message once I'd gotten my MediaSmart booted up and on the network. Turned out to be relatively easy to deal with once I'd figured out the correct order to do things in, but it was not intuitive. Hopefully, the previous article was helpful.

Picking up where I left off...

Once my red, NETWORK CRITICAL messages finally went away, I still received a couple of warnings (the first related to the lack of antivirus software, which I immediately installed, but had not quite figured out how to activate, and the second related to not having web services enabled).

Setting Up My MediaSmart EX495 (part 1 of 2)

I was nervous about setting up my EX495. I've built a lot of computers and even deployed some servers without keyboards and monitors, but I've never actually worked with a Windows box designed to function without a monitor and keyboard. I was certain it would all work, and I'm no stranger to accessing systems over a network, but it still wasn't clear to me how it would all work. I guess it was time to simply suspend disbelief and follow the instructions.