Best NAS/home network solution

What is the best NAS/home network solution?
Current Network:
two Arch, one desktop, one laptop
two macs, ditto
wlan router without usb port
two printers
one scanner
Current situation:
All printers and the scanner are on the Arch desktop running samba. I don't seem to be able to stream from samba, at least wiki doesn't appear to mention it.
Ideal situation:
- music and video streaming
- printing without need for desktop to be on
- central pim data storage, ideally so that I can have my pim suite open (I use kontact but am willing to change - need email, calendar, address book, RSS & newsreeder) on two machines and they don't get their knickers in a twist... Is that at all possible?
- automatic mounting
Even more ideal situation
- all of the above
- WAN streaming
Personally I don't see the wood for the trees at the mo...

toad wrote:
What is the best NAS/home network solution?
Ideal situation:
- music and video streaming
- printing without need for desktop to be on
- central pim data storage, ideally so that I can have my pim suite open (I use kontact but am willing to change - need email, calendar, address book, RSS & newsreeder) on two machines and they don't get their knickers in a twist... Is that at all possible?
- automatic mounting
Even more ideal situation
- all of the above
- WAN streaming
You already have the hardware, but the laptop may still be too power hungry or noisy. In that case a second hand eeebox something  or a self built VIA C7/ VIA Nano / Intel Atom based system may be a solution (see http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=61662&p=1).
If you want as little configuring as possible take a look at amahi, Freenas (or its coming Debian-spin off OpenMediaVault). They are  basically all-in-one homeserver distros. If you want to take the DIY route then I can recommend these apps:
- music and video streaming: mediatomb +djmount (upnp protocol) / FireFly (daap protocol) / mpd  (audio only). Or if you just want to watch/listen to your media on your pc that is stored on your server then a share could be enough.
- print-server: not sure, cups maybe?
- central pim: : this is pretty complex to set up right. You need things like a
pop3/imap mailserver -> dovecot / qmail / postfix
groupware app (shared calendar, webmail, tasks etc) ->  Zarafa / Zimbra / open-xchange.com / Sogo /  Group-Office / Citadel ... )
synchronization using caldav/icalendar
mobile synch of contacts/calendar/mail via ActiveSync or syncML protocol ->  funambol or z-push. Zarafa is one of the few options with a free  ActiveSync connection l believe.
- automatic mounting: can be done in many ways (smb/nfs/webdav/sshfs). I have a sshfs share mounted through /etc/fstab.
- WAN streaming: can easily be done with mpd. the latest version has streaming server built in so you don't need to set up a separate Icecast streaming server.
Last edited by rwd (2010-04-07 20:40:33)

Similar Messages

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    I'm sorry to hear that.
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    Patrick Hindman wrote:
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