Asus eee box as core for bigger installation

[_if_]

Hi guys,

I'm building my new house at the moment and am planing to set up a Linuxmce installation there.
I read in the forum the Asus EEE box would even work as a core for smaller installations, so could anybody tell for how many MDs it would be good enough? No HD needed, but at least 3 tv tuners, homeautomation, telecom, internetradio and so on.
I would use an usb adaptor for second NIC and put the tv-tuners in a MD.

The main reason I want to use the EEE box is the low power consumption.
In fact I later want to boot up the MD with the tuners automaticly for recordings and watching live tv, but that's for later...

any ideas?

thanks
IF

[totallymaxed]

Hi guys,

I'm building my new house at the moment and am planing to set up a Linuxmce installation there.
I read in the forum the Asus EEE box would even work as a core for smaller installations, so could anybody tell for how many MDs it would be good enough? No HD needed, but at least 3 tv tuners, homeautomation, telecom, internetradio and so on.
I would use an usb adaptor for second NIC and put the tv-tuners in a MD.

The main reason I want to use the EEE box is the low power consumption.
In fact I later want to boot up the MD with the tuners automaticly for recordings and watching live tv, but that's for later...

any ideas?

thanks
IF

Hi If,

Well you may have read other threads where i have related how we have used Eee Box's as Cores in various tests and also use Eee Top 1602's as the Core/Hybrid in a very portable demonstration system too. So in principle it is possible to use the Eee Box in this role. The challenge comes to move this from an 'experiment' to a usable system. Adding a second NIC is just the one step and as you say reasonably easily fixed. However if you main reason for using the Eee Box is to minimise your systems energy usage then not having your TV tuners attached to the Core is probably not a good strategy as typically you want your TV streaming and file streaming/serving to be available 24/7. Clearly if you locate the TV tuners in an MD you either have to power this off to achieve the power savings you are after or leave it powered up so that TV recordings or live viewing can be carried out whenever needed - the two are pretty much mutually exclusive. So my suggestion is that all the TV tuners really would want to be centrally managed/located at the Core for that reason.

All the best

Andrew

[_if_]

Hi Andrew and thanks for your answer,

it's right, I read your posts concerning the usage of the EEE as a core. How many "processing load" do you have on those demo systems usually? I mean, do you connect various MDs and stream to all of them lots of data?
For the tv tuners, my thought was that during the day nobody is at home, so the core would just need to do some home automation, alarm system and put phonecalls into voicemail - that's pretty much it. So running a real powerful server during whole day would cost a lot of energy which is not being used.
When booting up the MD in the home theater room for instance, I would send a WOL command by the startscript to the MD with the TV tuners. For other MDs I could place scenario buttons to wake the MD up.
I also want to place a lot of harddiskstorage into this MD which would not be used during the day.

do you think that would work?

thanks a lot!
IF

[totallymaxed]

Hi Andrew and thanks for your answer,

it's right, I read your posts concerning the usage of the EEE as a core. How many "processing load" do you have on those demo systems usually? I mean, do you connect various MDs and stream to all of them lots of data?
For the tv tuners, my thought was that during the day nobody is at home, so the core would just need to do some home automation, alarm system and put phonecalls into voicemail - that's pretty much it. So running a real powerful server during whole day would cost a lot of energy which is not being used.
When booting up the MD in the home theater room for instance, I would send a WOL command by the startscript to the MD with the TV tuners. For other MDs I could place scenario buttons to wake the MD up.
I also want to place a lot of harddiskstorage into this MD which would not be used during the day.

do you think that would work?

thanks a lot!
IF

Hi again,

Well a Core has very little to do once your MD's are booted as long as your storage is not directly connected to its SATA channels. So the load when streaming TV recordings, Music or DVD's is really only primarily on the machine with the storage system attached to it. So in that sense a 'light weight' Core works well. We tend to have our storage located in NAS's and these can be managed for power usage (ie UnRaid will spin down drives when they are not needed etc) or you can take the approach you are suggesting where the storage is located in an MD and that is powered off when not required...and powered up when needed.

All the best

Andrew

[_if_]

alright, so I will give it a try. (but first I have to finish the house)

thank you very much for your time, Andrew!