The last time I wrote about my server was three years ago. A lot has changed since then. Here’s some of the main points:
I’ve done some additional upgrades like swapping the measly 30GB SSD for a 120GB higher quality SSD and added a card reader in place of the floppy bay. I also removed the GTX 460 and am now running this server purely as a server. No more desktop Ubuntu. It was economical at the time, but I was having issues with stability and generally don’t like mixing environments.
I’m still running Kodi as my media center software with MariaDB running as the database engine. Kodi is invaluable to me. As I gather more and more media it has been able to scale exactly to my specifications. The wonderful devs over there are currently working on a branch to integrate libretro so we can have some game launching support. This is a major feature being added and I plan on donating as soon as it’s merged into core. Kodi has been running on a couple Mac Minis that I have plugged into the TV’s in my apartment.
My server is also acting as my DVR. By integrating tvheadend as a DVR server with an HDHomeRun plugged into an antenna I’ve been able to record and stream my local stations from anywhere. Since my last post Kodi has also added a ton of support for PVR backends. This integration is key and works exactly how I would imagine. Death to cable 🙂
I also use my server as a Steam download cache. I wrote a post on that earlier, you should check it out.
Finally, where do we go from here? Here’s a few things I have in the pipeline that I will probably complete by the end of the year: