![]() To boot to the CD, I used a portable external CD drive in a USB housing. What is needed is a small boot partition (30 MB) for FreeNAS, then the rest of the disk (232 GB once formatted) as a separate partition for the SqueezeCenter software and music library. This is the easiest way to install FreeNAS to the disk in the T5700. If you’re using a traditional PC as the host platform you can run FreeNAS in this manner without ever installing it to a hard drive.įor our purposes, we want to take advantage of a menu option that allows you to install FreeNAS to some other media (disk or flash) present on the host platform. The live CD is used when you want to boot the software from CD, and it stores its configuration files on a floppy disk or USB key. At the time of my installation, this was v 0.686.4 (stable). To start the process of building the software load, you’ll need to download the live CD ISO version of FreeNAS. ![]() ![]() Since the T5700 doesn’t have a PS/2 type keyboard connector, I used a USB keyboard. That means connecting a VGA display and keyboard to the system. We need to work directly on the T5700 for the initial software installation. I’m reasonably certain that I could fit three drives into the expansion case, but mounting them sensibly might be tricky, as would be finding a 44-pin IDE cable with connectors for multiple drives. But fitting multiple disks into the T5700 chassis might be a challenge. Fault tolerance is simply not a requirement for my dedicated music NAS, so one 2.5″ disk was all I needed.įreeNAS can easily be configured to support RAID 0, 1 or 5 given suitable storage media. I have all my music backed up onto portable hard drives and the original CDs as well, so I feel that I’m adequately protected. While commercial NASes often feature RAID storage, I decided that this wasn’t necessary for my purposes. So I needed only about 200 GB available for music. My music library is over 400 GB, but I decided that I could keep a significant portion of the library on offline storage. The best deal I could find was a 250 GB, 5400 RPM Western Digital drive for $99. So the obvious choice for a storage strategy was to replace the flash module with a laptop style 2.5″ IDE hard drive. The T5700s come with an internal flash disk-on-module (DOM) on a 44-pin IDE connector. They also offer a release built specifically for the Netgear (formerly Infrant) ReadyNAS.įigure 4: HP T 5700 thin client with the side removed This software, written in Perl, was once known as “Slim Server” but from the release of v7.0 has been renamed “SqueezeCenter.” Slim Devices provides releases for Windows, Macintosh and Linux hosts. At my house, we have accumulated three of the classic Squeezeboxes and are on-plan to purchase two more.Īll Slim Devices products source their music streams from the same open source server software. This can be handy, addressing the needs of both the common dinner party and a multi-faceted Halloween haunted house. One of the nicer things about the Squeezebox is that several can be set to play the same music in sync, or set to play entirely different playlists. Transporter – a beautiful, seriously high-end streaming music interface for those who suffer audiophile tendencies.Squeezebox Duet – a variant on the Squeezebox with that trades the fluorescent display for a more elaborate remote control with a color LCD status display.Squeezebox Classic – the 3 rd generation of the original SliMP3 with a simple remote control and large vacuum fluorescent display (Figure 1).Slim Devices is now part of Logitech and offers three different devices: They then made money by selling a dedicated hardware device to interface the music stream to a traditional stereo system. I found Slim’s approach very interesting literally giving away an open source media streaming software intended for use on a file server. From my first exposure to Slim Device’s original SliMP3 back in 2003, I was taken with the idea of streaming music throughout my house.
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