My Home Network

A prerequisite of working in IT is the need for an overcomplex home network setup. With that in mind, i thought i'd share some details of mine. I'm a big fan of media. Pictures, videos, films, TV series. The media streaming ability of my network is its biggest advantage.

I use the endpoints in both my living room and bedroom to stream media from the Twonky media server installed on the Western Digital 4Tb NAS. The Twonky server and both the Xbox and PS3 endpoints use DLNA for this.

My IP camera uploads images to the WD NAS upon motion detection and keeps a watchful eye over my garden shed. Alerts are also sent remotely to my WP7 handheld device for when i'm not at home.

The DDWRT firmware on my Linksys router allows IPSEC VPN setup and dynamic DNS updates for easy and secure remote access.

Changing Twonky Media Content Base Path

So I recently purchased a new NAS drive for my home network. I have a large music library, and even larger library of digital pictures so went whole hog and got the new Western Digital MybookWorld 2, 4Tb version. This comes pre-installed with Twonky Media Server. I created a folder structure to match that of my existing NAS drive and copied the contents over, then set about configuring the Twonky Media Server (I use this to stream my Videos/Music/Pictures to endpoints around my house, Xbox 360, PS3, Iphone). Only to find that the Twonky media server is preconfigured to a base content path 2 folder structures higher than I have placed my media! :|

When I attempted to specify a new content location in Twonky I couldn’t select the new folders I had created (even when attempting to start the path with ../../Datavolume/Media). When examining the log files that Twonky creates I noticed that there was a contentbase defined as..

“INI value:contentbase=/DataVolume/Public/”

Whereas all my media was located in “/DataVolume/Media/”. I did find a few ways of changing this value which consisted of enabling ssh onto the nas, and altering the twonky ini file with vi. While I am extremely competent with Linux and Vi afer working as an Oracle DBA for a number of years I steered clear of this for the following reasons...

A) My Western Digital warranty going bye bye! (I paid £300+ pounds for the nas and don’t want to lose it!)
B) Should the procedure go wrong I wasn’t looking forward to reinstalling Twonky from scratch!

I found the following (not very well documented) procedure to change the URL from a browser window. Just enter the command in your address window and follow any credential prompts if you have authentication enabled.

http://IP:Port/rpc/set_option?contentbase=New Base Path

For Example…
http://192.168.1.10:9000/rpc/set_option?contentbase=/DataVolume/Media