Home Network Set Ups

[N.B.Morton]

I have been trying to do some research on setting up a nice home/media network and have not been able to find much reference anywhere about it for Macs. I have an imac at home as well as a macbook and I was just trying to see what kind of set ups people are running and how well they are working out. I am definitely interested in the apple tv and time capsule and would like to see what peoples opinions are on them as well. If anyone out there has a nice set up they are proud of let me know what your running.

 

[daze]

I have a Linksys WRT54GL acting as a router and a wireless G access point. Also have an Apple Extreme N connected to a Gigabit Netgear 8 port switch. Attached to the Extreme is a 500GB Seagate for use with Time Machine for my MacBook Pro and G5. Extreme is providing N wireless services, mostly, for the MacBook Pro since only it supports N.

Have a PC with an AMD 2.1GHz Dual Core running Ubuntu 8.04 with 2GB RAM. It is functioning as a Apple File Share server with 4 500GB Seagates in a RAID 5 setup; Total disk space is then 1.5 TB. On my MacBook Pro, I run MediaLink and Connect 360 to serve media files to my PS3 and XBox 360.

There is a lot more detail and services running on the AMD, but that is beyond the scope of this short post.

Daze

 

[Fonzijr1964]

My set up

Apple Airport extreme __ wired to iMac__WD MyBook studio 1TB
>>wireless to >>PS3
>>>>>>>>>>>Wii
>>>>>>>>>>>MBA
>>>>>>>>>>>MB
>>>>>>>>>>>thinkpad

Works well

 

[paduck]

If possible, I would recommend getting a wired solution between at least your broadband, your computer and your home entertainment system. That is going to give you a lot of reliability and a minimum 100 megabit connection speed between your media location and your computer.

Having said that, at the moment, I don't have a wired solution myself. I will move that direction as soon as possible though. I think that it opens up a lot of possibilities that being exclusively wireless leaves out.

Here is my configuration at the moment:

Cable Internet->Linksys WRT54G (running DD-WRT firmware)
Hard wired->iMac G3 (for kids), Linksys PAP2 VOIP converter
Wireless->iMac G5 (main computer), Apple TV (which I do NOT stream video to), Airport Express (for AirTunes), iPhone

I'd like to run wires to my iMac G5 and Apple TV. I would also like to hook up some sort of networked storage, although for my current configuration, an external Firewire/USB array for backup would probably be sufficient. The wired network would give me a much faster, more reliable connection between various locations. Wireless would still be available as an option for AirTunes, laptops and iPhone, etc.

I would be very interested in some sort of iTunes media server option that would be a central storage place for all my audio and video files. That way, I would have access without having to have my computer running with iTunes up (which I actually don't do now). However, no such device exists right now. With all the various hard drives/storage I have (computer, Apple TV, two iPods, Apple TV, etc.) it would be nice to have everything centralized and shared - but not on the computer itself.