blog.mjwedeking » tech

Home Network Upgrade

Matthew Wedeking — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 04:07:45 +0000

I was thumbing through the Fry’s Ad the other day and saw a deal on a Network Attached Storage (NAS) I have been pondering, the Buffalo LinkStation Live, for only $140. It is nothing great but would do the job cheap. After getting there and looking around Michelle noticed another NAS on sale, the Iomega StorCenter Network Hard Drive 1TB for $260. It is a dual 500 GB drive NAS with RAID 1 support (so all of our data is on 2 drives in case of a HD failure), Gigabit Ethernet, and support for Mac, Linux and Windows.

I got the Iomega NAS home and realized I didn’t have a Gigabit switch or a Gigabit Network Interface Card (NIC) in my desktop computer. So, I ordered a D-Link Gigabit Switch from Newegg.com and picked up a D-Link NIC from Office Depot.

After getting everything installed I set up the NAS to have home directories for Michellle and I, a media share (to store all of our pictures, music and videos), and a general pubic share to save whatever else. On the Windows PC I set up two network drives: the H drive (map to the user home share) and N drive (map to the media share). On the Mac I set it up to mount the NAS at login. I also configured iTunes on both our Windows and Mac computers to access the music on the NAS from a common music library.

Now all I need is a Gigabit Wireless N Router to replace the G in the family room.

If only I could get rid of the Actiontec (POS Verizon).

So, I got a Mac

Matthew Wedeking — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 20:09:24 +0000

I took the plunge and got a Mac. It was something I wanted to try out but it just happened so quick. The full story will be posted on The Wedekings. All I need now is some Birkenstocks and granola.

Photos at The Wedekings

Matthew Wedeking — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 20:02:15 +0000

You have got to go check out our photos at TheWedekings.com. I found a plugg-in for WorPress called FAlbum and after a little php and css edits it will query pictures from Michelle’s Flickr gallery and display them on our site. I still have some bugs to work out but for the most part it is working the way it should.

Users

Matthew Wedeking — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 21:30:02 +0000

You can now create a user and login onto 1-800-Ask-Matt. A big thanks has to go out to Trap17, that tutorial helped out quite a bit. Currently all it does is automatically put your user name in when asking a question. I would like to create user profile pages, email you when you questions is answered, and email you when other new questions are asked. I also need to make the login and register pages more pleasing on the eyes.