Nerd’s Unite! Help me build my media server

July 14, 2007

Details

WARNING! WARNING! Major Geekery being discussed below.

Hey guys,

I am in a bit of a dilemma right now. I am in the midst of trying to build a media server that will house all our music, photos, and videos and I don’t know what to do. I’ve looked around and found some solutions but most are Mac-only solutions. I have a Windows server with Mac clients though!

Here’s what I’ve accomplished so far.

The Hardware Details

Server = Windows XP Pro box (2GB RAM, 500GB-ish space across 3 HD’s)
1 Macbook Pro (Intel)
1 Macbook (Intel)

The Software

I have setup the server as a Windows box due to my backup solution that I am using called Mozy. Mozy allows me to backup remotely any and all files off of that box. Great little app, btw. So, unfortunately, the Windows machine is going to stay.

The Desires

We don’t want anything too difficult really, just to be able to house everything on the media server although all the pictures will be imported, all the music will be purchased off of the clients. It feels like I’m going to do a bunch of copy/paste/copy/paste junk to dump it on the server but is there a better solution to this?

I’ve also considered using Foldershare to do syncing back and forth but I’d REALLY prefer not to house the entire music/picture/video folders on each of our Mac’s that would just take up hard drive space.

Side question: Is there a solution out there that will sync our Mac’s Iphoto and Itunes directory by looking at the Windows directory as reference? If not, someone should build that.