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Red Hat Cert

So, I have been unemployed for a few months now. I have been on a lot of interviews, but they all want to take 30-60 days to get someone hired. If someone is without a job, waiting 60 days to get one can be a killer. I was finally offered a job with the State of Arizona – Department of Environmental Quality. I will be a (mostly Windows/Active Directory) Sysadmin. This is great for me, as I have an extensive background in AD, Windows Server, Hyper-V, Exchange, GPO, etc.

One thing I have found in my endless search for new employment is that even when someone is looking for a Windows sysadmin, they still want linux experience. No one single server technology runs all of the critical systems needed by today’s technology dependent companies. Even if it can run all the systems, it probably isn’t the best at it and may not be the most cost effective way of deploying a specific technology. Because of these, and a few other factory like the fact linux admins make 2-4 times the money windows admins make, I have decided to take on the task of becoming a Red Hat Certified System Administrator.

I am very luck in that I have a very close friend who is a linux admin at Wells Fargo. He has decided to take on this challenge with me and my brother. Together the three of us have a wide array of technical skills. I don’t think their is anything on earth the three of us couldn’t fix together. Justin is one of my oldest friends, and has always been there for me. I owe him a huge debt just for being my friend for over a decade. We have been meeting on evenings and weekends to study for our exam. Because I have been unemployed, I have been getting together with Justin during the day to study while he works.

Having someone well versed in linux to bounce ideas off of, and get clarification has been a hung advantage. Sometimes, when all you have is text to read from, things just don’t click. Having the ability to get it explained to me by someone who has a lot of experience in Red Hat has to be the single most important piece to my study. Thanks Justin! I highly recommend befriending a linux sysadmin.

For more information on the RHCSA, criteria, topics covered, etc. Check out Red Hat’s Website. To check your skills head over to Red Hat’s online skills assessment.

I have been through the ringer more than a few times with crappy apps and programs that just dont’ live up to expectations. I have a few programs that I rely on every day to make sure my HTPC is running and working the way I want it to. Here is my list of Must-Have apps for your HTPC:

Video Players:

• VLC Media Player: VLC is a free and open source cross-platform multimedia player and framework that plays most multimedia files as well as DVD, Audio CD, VCD, and various streaming protocols. This app can do it all. I use this for everything! It supports every codec under the sun, and can even stream content over your network. My favorite stand alone video player by far.
   
• XBMC Media Center: XBMC is an award-winning free and open source (GPL) software media player and entertainment hub for digital media. See my previous post for more info on XBMC. Lets just say I *HEART* XBMC! It’s the best!
   
• Boxee: Probably the best way to watch TV shows from the Internet on your TV. Boxee does all the work searching site after site to see what episodes of what shows are posted online. Then, it puts a nice link right there in front of you so you can watch it. The interface was well thought out for viewing on a TV, and it has a boat load of free content to watch. If you don’t have it already, get it, then thank me in the comments. If you are keeping cable TV because you don’t want to give up your shows…This app could save you all that money.

Codec:

• K-Lite Codec Pack: Really the only Codec Pack you will ever need. The only one I ever use, and I always use it. Tons and tons and tons and tons of Codecs and great flexibility with the setup and tweaking of things like fddshow & DirectShow. Just get it and don’t ask questions.

ISO Image/CD-DVD-BluRay Burning Software:

• Imgburn: ImgBurn is a lightweight CD / DVD / HD DVD / Blu-ray burning application that everyone should have in their toolkit. It supports creating, burning, and converting. You can even check the quality of the burns your drive is producing. must have app for sure!
   
• CDBurnerXP: CDBurnerXP is a free application to burn CDs and DVDs, including Blu-Ray and HD-DVDs. ImgBurn is great for working with ISOs, but this app has a great Drag-n-Drop interface that works great when you just need to burn a few files to Disk.
   
• Magic ISO: MagicISO is a powerful CD/DVD image file creating/editing/extracting tool. It can open / create / edit /extract CD/DVD image files, and it can convert bin to iso and back.  as well as make ISO file from DVD/CD-ROM or hard disk, and handle bootable information at meanwhile. This does all the same stuff as ImgBurn, except this can also mount ISO files as virtual Drives in Windows, so no more burning that ISO to a disk, just mount it to a virtual drive and use as normal. To be honest that is the only feature of this app I use, but it is worth having just for that.

Media Center Operating Systems:

• Element PC: Element is a free operating system for home theater PCs, media center computers, and set-top boxes. Element has an innovative “across the room” interface designed to be connected to your HDTV for a digital media and internet experience from within the comforts of your own living room or lounge. The OS is really deigned well. It is the best OS for tv only viewing I have seen. Element Comes loaded with tons of really useful apps such as the Firefox Web Browser, Pidgin Messenger, and XBMC Media Center, along with access to numerous on-line content services from Hulu, Cooliris, Boxee, Clicker, Amazon on Demand, Youtube XL, and more. This is a must-Check out app for sure.
   
• GeeXboX: GeeXboX is a free and Open Source Media-Center purposed Linux distribution for embedded devices and desktop computers. GeeXboX is not an application, it’s a full-featured OS, that one can boot as a LiveCD, from a USB key, an SD/MMC card or install on its regular HDD. The GeeXboX distribution is lightweight and designed for one single goal: embed all major multimedia applications as to turn your computer into an HTPC.
   
• LinuxMCE: Not my favorite, but worth a look. It lacks some of the finish and polish that the others have, but it does offer some nice features that the others don’t. Most notably access to home automation systems, and video surveillance integration. For me, this isn’t the answer, but it may be for you.
   

Utilities:

• 7-Zip: 7-Zip is a free application for packing / unpacking archives(.Zip .RAR .ISO .TAR Etc.) It has a lot of nice features, and don’t bother you all the time with a “Please buy me” screen like WinRAR or winZIP does.
   
• uTorrent: My Favorite Bit Torrent Client. Very fast, and I never have issues with it. “uTorrent is less than 400 KB (smaller than your Facebook pic!). It installs ultra-fast with a light footprint on your computer, and runs super-efficiently.” I couldn’t have said it better.
   
• UltraVNC: Fast, effective VNC Server/Client. UltraVNC is an easy to use and free software that can display the screen of another computer (Your Media Server) on your screen. The program allows you to use your mouse and keyboard to control the other PC. Removing the need for a Monitor, Keyboard or a mouse.
   
• VirtualDUB: VirtualDub is mainly geared toward processing AVI files, although it can read (not write) MPEG-1 and also handle sets of BMP images. It is very useful for taking AVI files and putting them together into 1 file. If you are like me and hate having part1 and part2 of a movie, use Virtual DUB to put them together and make 1 file containing both halfs. Like most of the apps in this list, it only have 1 main use for me, but it is an app I rely on a lot to perform that 1 task I need it to do.  
   

This is my list for now. This covers most of the every-day apps I find to be essential to making my HTCP work for me. Hopefully you can get some use out of them as well. As always, leave your comments below and be sure to let me know what apps you can’t live without in your setup.

Happy Viewing,
Nick

Nick Hill is a systems administrator with 10+ years of experience in the I.T. field. His hobby/passion is to fully integrate all the features and conveniences of a monthly TV service into a full featured and fully on-demand home viewing experience without an outrageous monthly fee!

I think that we would all agree aesthetics is a rather important part of the Media Center/HTPC. However you choose to display/hide/integrate your HTPC into your existing home theater/TV stand, choosing a case can be the more important than you might think.

Choosing a case that fits into your existing setup can make or break the idea. Not only because the wife doesn’t want some big ugly tower sitting next to the TV, but in my case I didn’t want anyone to be able to tell a computer was there at all. I am from the school of blend and hide. I want my setup to be as natural and low-key as possible.

When I went looking for a case to house my HTPC/Media Server I wanted something that was right at home with the rest of my gear. It had to blend in with my receiver and my DVD player. I had two different schools of thought.

Option 1: Go small, compact, and hide-able:

This makes a lot of sense for a lot of people. Get something discrete that doesn’t take up a lot of room. Most of the small HTPC cases have quiet cooling options built-in to keep noise down, and they look nice in a lot of setups. On the other side of the coin, they are not capable of handling full height expansion cards. Cases of this size have a very limited number of hard drive bays. Most can only take a Micro-ATX motherboard, so you are giving up expansion slots and sometimes memory slots as well.

These cases can come in many shapes, sizes and materials. Here a few examples:

This isn't going to stand out at all.

Apex DM-387 Computer Case

So, to review:  

• Small/compact size
• affordable
• not upgradeable
• no/very little expansion
• many designs options

Option 2: Don’t worry about size, just get something that looks right.

If you go for a full size case with a HTPC feel, you get the best of both worlds. You get a normal size case with normal features, just with a front that is more HTPCish. The big advantage to this is that almost all of your existing hardware will fit into the case. It has a lot of room for expansion slots, memory, and normally 4-8 Hard drive bays. That is a lot more than you will get with a Micro case. The price may be a bit more, but you can easily spend less than $100 and still get the case that fits your setup. Here are a few examples:

So, to review:

• Larger, full size case
• looks like it belongs in a theater/stereo setup
• A lot of room for expansion
• 3 or 4 times as much space for Hard drives as a small case.
• Supports a wide range of boards and cards.

I am a little bias because I have the nMediaPC 2000B case, and love it. but I just can’t see using something so small for a Media server. If you want to use a tiny case for a DIY set-top media stream that is fine, but as a place to hold your core media I fully advocate using a nice large case with room for all your stuff.

For some cases check out these links:

• nMediaPC
• TigerDirect.com
• Newegg
• Amazon.com
• Antec

Please leave your comments below. I love to hear your thoughts and ideas.

 Nick Hill is a systems administrator with 10+ years of experience in the I.T. field. His hobby/passion is to fully integrate all the features and conveniences of a monthly TV service into a full featured and fully on-demand home viewing experience without an outrageous monthly fee!

One of the main reasons I was able to get rid of my monthly paid TV service was because I had a rather large amount of digital media stored on my HTPC. I had a standard windows XP computer with a few Terabytes of movies, TV shows, and music that I have collected over the years. I am an avid media ripper, and I always create digital backups/copies of any media that I buy. For the most part I don’t ever use the DVDs or CDs them self. I always play the digital copies.

The old way:

Music: At the time I had a lot of content and I was using several methods to play the content when I wanted it. First, I was using iTunes on my iMac to play my music. I had an iPhone at the time, and my brother has an iPod Touch so using iTunes was a good solution.

Videos: Like most people I have a plethora of movies and TV shows cataloged in a large messy folder structure. I knew where things were (most of the time) but it was impossible for others to fine anything. I was using VLC media player to play my videos and to stream some content over my network. This was a cumbersome, but acceptable streaming solution at the time.

Pictures: Flickr is the main place I keep photos, but I also have a lot of photos scattered all over my hard drive.

Keeping track: This was bad. I was using some folder structure to try and catalog 400 movies and another few hundred TV episodes. Something had to be done about it! Enter the White Knight on his trusty steed.

XBMC to the rescue!

I was in search for a multi-platform, free media center solution that was able to play all of my content, keep it organized, and make it easy to access when I, or someone else, wanted to play something. After checking out several solutions I steeled on Xbox Media Center. XBMC is an award-winning free and open source (GPL) software media player and entertainment hub for nearly all of your digital media. It is available for all major OS platforms including iOS devices like iPhone/iPad and AppleTV (first and 2^nd GEN). XBMC has been translated into over 30 languages.

So, all this sounds great, but what does it do that is so special?

I’m so glad you asked! XBMC does several things very well. First it plays any media, in any format under the sun, from any source. If you are like me, you have media in lots of different formats, ISO, AVI, DivX, MPEG, DVD, H.264, etc. XBMC can handle them all. I was going to include a complete list of all the supported formats in this article, but the list was so long, that all I can do is include this link to the XBMC wiki. It can also stream content from the internet. It has a plethora of add-ons or Plug-ins that can be downloaded and installed from directly inside the application. No downloading, copying to a folder, unzip, etc. It is all managed from inside the Add-on Manager. Some of the plug-ins include: Netflix, ESPN, CNN, Fox News, TWiT, Revision 3, Shoutcast Top 500, Last.FM and GroveShark as well as dozens of others. The plug-ins are written by regular users, who want to extend the uses of XBMC. The scripts are written in python. No special language to learn.

Recently XBMC has also integrated a front-end for MythTV PVR/DVR software. Now you can record manage and play Videos from your MythTV server in the same place you play all of your other media. How awesome is that?!

XBMC Add-on Manager

Okay, so it plays a lot of media. Tons of programs can do that. What’s the big deal?

XBMC isn’t just a media player. It is a full service media manager, player, and server all in one beautiful package. Once you add your media folders to XBMC, and tell it what time of media it is (TV, Music, Movies, Photos, Etc.) XBMC catalogs all of your media in a database and then uses ‘scrapers’ goes out to the internet and download all the data about each film or show. You can get DVD/CD Cover art, Fan art for each show and movie, as well as a synopsis of each film and that film’s IMDB rating all download automatically. This not only makes finding and going through your media so simple and smooth it also makes it easier to find something to watch. The Media Library also includes information about the file/format displayed right on the screen. It is 720p or 1080p? 16:9 resolution? AVI? DivX? Bluray? All the technical info is displayed discreetly alongside the films genre, runtime, year of release, and studio. Of course all of these are displayed different depending on what skin you choose. It even shows you the local weather on the home screen if you want it to. How thoughtful is that?

Aeon Skin Home Page

Transparicy! Theme Movie Browser

XBMC also can directly integrate with your Flicker or Photobucket accounts. It can stream your photos as a screen saver, or allow you to thumb through like a slide show. Nice for entertaining or kids birthday parties.

I know having a media center PC is a hassle when you have to get up and go to the keyboard all the time. Even a wireless keyboard or mouse can be clunky to have in the living room, so XBMC has support for IR remote controls. It also supports UPnP playback. This allows you to have a video on your cell phone or laptop and play itthrough XBMC onto your TV without transferring any files. All these features are designed to make life nice and easy.

Now it’s time to cover the most amazing, time saving, wonderful, boner-causing feature of them all. It can play media directly from a RAR/ZIP archive. No extracting needed!!! Let me say that one more time. You DON’T have to unRAR/unzip your media for XBMC to play it!

My Special Needs:

We all have special requirements that can make or break a software program in our environment. For me it was touch screen. I have a 15in Touch screen monitor I bought on ebay a few years back that is the control for my media center. So, the software that I use has to be touch friendly. Large buttons, easy navigation, no keyboard interaction needed (after setup), and it has to look nice both on my 15 in. monitor and on my 32 in. LCD TV. I will admit that not all of the skins are touch friendly. Some of the ones that I think look the best, are the hardest to use on a touch screen monitor. I personally use the MadiaStream Redux skin. It has large well defined selection menus, simple scrolling, and it look amazing on a large format TV. It is very customizable. You can change the skin, the menu items on the home screen, the view of your media, and they way it is displayed among a zillion other settings and tweaks that can really make this application yours if you want to. Leaving it stock is also a good choice since everything you need to make the most of your media is turned on from the get-go.

MediaStream Redux Theme Home Screen

Conclusion:

I would be naive to think that this program will fill the needs of everyone all the time. I know it won’t. But, if you are looking for amazingly well developed media center software that will provide robustness and a feature rich user experience then please give XBMC a try. XBMC has been the savior of my media collection and will continue to be the focal point of my home’s media playing.

For more information or to download please visit http://www.xbmc.org

Nick Hill is a systems administrator with 10+ years of experience in the I.T. field. His hobby/passion is to fully integrate all the features and conveniences of a monthly TV service into a full featured and fully on-demand home viewing experience without an outrageous monthly fee!

Getting started transforming your home into a digital palace of on-demand goodness can be a lengthy process. The important thing is to understand the parts that make up the whole. One of the most important things is how do you get all your digital devices to play nice together? If you have all of your shows and movies stored on a media server, or network attached storage (NAS), how do you access and play that content on other devices? That is where DLNA/UPnP comes in to play.

Digital Living Network Alliance(DLNA) is an open standard that was created in June 2004. DLNA was created because companies finally figured out that their products work better and more effectively when they work together with other companies products. This realization gave us the most important step to a connected digital home. In early 2001 DLNA finally started to certify software products. This allows you to take a computer or other device that does not have native support for DLNA and add the features and functionality though the use of a program. According to the official DLNA site, only one (1) software product has been Certified, and that is Skifta for Android. We are expecting many, many more.

Why should you care about DLNA? Simple. All those shows, movies and songs that are stored on your media server/NAS can be accessed and played by any other device on your network, as long as both the player and server/storage and DLNA enabled. This makes playing media in multiple locations in your home much easier.

The list of products that are DLNA enabled is amazing and growing all the time. TVs, cell phones, tablets, software products, set top boxes, DVD/Blu-RAY players, even digital photo frames and refrigerators. Check out the DLNA Certified Product Searchon dlna.org for a complete list of certified products.

How does UPnP come into play in this equation?
It seems that DLNA has everything covered. You can share, copy and play media to and from devices. Why do you need anything more? Well all these wonderful tasks that DLNA performs, can’t be done unless every device supports it. A lot of devices do, but not everything. Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) is a set of networking protocols for primarily residential networks without enterprise class devices that permits networked devices, such as personal computers, printers, Internet gateways, Wi-Fi access points and mobile devices to seamlessly discover each other’s presence on the network and establish functional network services for data sharing, communications, and entertainment. This means that UPnP will detect the device, establish what it can do, and integrate it into the network of other devices. This is how things on your network get to know each other.

UPnP operated with a set of defined jobs for particular devices.

• UPnP Media Server DCP– This is the master UPnP server. This is where the Media is stored. This device streams content (music, video, pictures, etc.) to the other UPnP Devices on your network. This is commonly played by media server software such as XBMC, mythTV, or FUPPES
• UPnP Media Control Point– This is a client device like a set top box, software media player or tablet. It can auto-detect the UPnP Media server, and stream their content. The WD Live HD Media Player, Netgear ReadyNAS and Playstation 3 are examples of hardware Media Control Points. Software applications that can perform this task include VLC Media Player, WinAmp, and Microsoft Windows Media Player. Most Software Media Servers can also double as Media Control Points as well.
• UPnP Media Renderer DCP – This is a simple device that can play media. All previous devices listed also fall into this category.

UPnP is supported by your computers operating systems including Windows Vista, Windows 7, and with a little bit or work, windows XP. Mac OS X and Linux also have support for UPnP. For a much more detailed list of UPnP AV media servers and clients check Wikipedia.

UPnP, DLNA and a combination of the 2 form a rich and user friendly backbone to sharing media in the home environment. They make life easy. They allow all your devices, be it Windows, Mac OS, Linux, or a network appliance to all speak the same language, allowing you the joy of experiencing your media on your terms.

Your thoughts and ideas are welcome. Please use the comments section below.

Nick Hill is a systems administrator with 10+ years of experience in the I.T field. His hobby/passion is to fully integrate all the features and conveniences of a monthly TV service into a full featured and fully on-demand home viewing experience without an outrageous monthly fee!

Hey everyone, welcome to SysadminSith.org’s Ditch the Cable Blog. This will be the home of software and product reviews, How-To’s and a host of editorial comenterry on the best ways to stop paying hundreds of dollars to the cable and Satellite companies. Start ownign your own content and putting money back in your pocket!