At work we’ve made it a practice on our team to take turns presenting lunchtime “Brown Bag” sessions on various technologies of interest.  Usually the topics involve something work related which can be applied somewhere on our project.

I’d had casual conversations with a few team members in the past about our home network and DVR solution.  I thought it would make a good brown bag session and was urged on by a few of them when they expressed interest. 

I decided to go for it and cover all aspects of our home linux server, from TV to Music to File Storage.

For those interested, the full presentation can be downloaded in two formats:

• 1 hour recording of the live brownbag session (CVX_Brown_bag.avi – 245mb) (right click -> Save As..)
• The full slide deck and accompanying screencasts (Home_Server_Presentation.zip – 75mb)

The live recording is good if you have the time and want to hear about everything in great detail.  The second option is better if you’d prefer to just browse through the slides and watch the screencasts at your own pace.  Note that you’ll need to use the included Video Player (vlc) if you go the second route.  Load the Video_Player.exe found in the Video_Player folder.  When the presentation has a bullet that says “Queue video: ” just drag and drop that particular file (video) onto the player you’d previously opened.

Presentation Outline:

• MythTV (4-tuner PC-based DVR)
• XBMC Media Center (watch recordings around the house)
• TorrentFlux (bittorrent services)
• SqueezeCenter (Music server)
• Remote Storage / File Server
• Virtual Machine Hosting
• Residential VoIP (Internet Telephony)
• Irssi (Internet Relay Chat)