Apress - Smart Home Automation with Linux (2010)- P25:Linux users can now control their homes remotely! Are you a Linux user who has ever wanted to turn on the lights in your house, or open and close the curtains, while away on holiday? Want to be able to play the same music in every room, controlled from your laptop or mobile phone? Do you want to do these things without an expensive off-the-shelf kit | CHAPTER 3 MEDIA SYSTEMS Note On first glance it appears wasteful for NAS1 to connect to NodeO only to be connected back to NAS1 but to scale up effectively provide all media in a unified environment and support dynamic changes in the media architecture this is the best way to do it. The directory structure I use pulls together all the Samba shares like this net homenet slug1 media_tv and local disks like this net homenet mediapc1 usb2 media movies into a hierarchy underneath net homenet as a number of links or Samba mounts. This is becomes a self-documenting report for the media server layout of home. I then create a series of links under the net media directory to hide the structure ln -s net homenet mediapc1 usb1 media tv net media tv ln -s net homenet mediapc1 usb2 media movies net media movies ln -s net homenet itx1 usb1 media mp3 net media music ln -s net homenet slug1 usb1 media videos net media videos It s then a simple matter of adding Samba shares for each directory media_tv comment Media TV path net media tv browseable yes public yes writable no read only yes guest ok yes As in Chapter 1 I create basic Samba shares that are read-only for the family and create separate ones for me that are password-protected and read-write. Note also that I have used my home s subdomain homenet as a delimiter from the rest of the directory instead of placing everything in net. It allows me as a software developer to create my own subnet that isn t part of the general home automation network in case I need to do something risky or experimental Media Extenders Once you have a file server providing access to your media you then need some way of rendering the media aurally or visually to the world. This can involve stand-alone hardware a Linux-based machine or a combination of the two. 98 CHAPTER 3 MEDIA SYSTEMS Stand-Alone Hardware To fit into this category the hardware must connect the network use DHCP to determine its IP address and then stream the data from a file server .
