[Zoom]

I'm looking to set up a 1TB file/media server in my house - a place to rip all my tunes and movies for network access. I was about to buy a barebones PC kit and run Linux, but then a friend suggested I just use my current desktop system.

Here's what I'm thinking now. I have a PowerMac G5 that I've upgraded quite a bit, but I'm also sitting on some extra cash and I'm thinking of grabbing a refurb Mac Pro. Honestly, I don't need all that horsepower, but I figure I can get $1100+ for my current system and trade up to a Mac Pro for less than $1000 (again, refurb).

Anyway, if I do this... can I slap a couple 500GB drives in the Mac Pro and partition them off for network-accessible storage? I already have a 250B and 500GB drive in my current system that I want to keep (I do some home movie editing and stuff which eats space), but that leaves two drive bays open.

Ideally, here's what I want to do:

- rip my CDs (again) in a lossless format
- rip my DVDs, uncompressed
- access these from the desktop as ANY user, at least as file if not in iTunes
- access these from the network

Do I set up a special account on the Mac for these? Or can you somehow designate these drives as pure, open storage and not associated with any account? Is this a security risk (I have secured wifi)?

How would this work with iTunes on that system - can anyone access the songs? I'd actually want to import them all as AAC, though, for my iPod. Hmmmm.... That would be a per-account thing, I'm sure. Can two people on one system share iTunes with separate playlists and iPods?? See, I have a girlfriend who has an account on the box and we share music. We each have our own iPods. I guess that's a different issue, but part of the picture for me.

[peeb]

Do you want to just access them, or be able to manage the itunes account from another machine? You could just share the itunes library on the network. A cheaper and more energy effecient way to do it might just be to get a router that shares USB drives.

[Zoom]

I want to be very flexible - I want to access the files as raw files: mp3's, mov's, VIDEO_TS, avi, whatever.

For example, I'll want to be able to access them from my Xbox running XBMC. I've already done that with my current machine, but I had to put my user ID and password in the XBMC sources.xml file, which horrible security. But I could create a "file server user" account for this and probably give read/write access to all the other accounts on the machine, with read-only access for guest/anonymous users - something like that is what I'm envisioning.

Anyone ever hear of JBOD (Just a Bunch Of Disks)? Can you do this on a Mac Pro? It makes a series of drives look like one big drive. It's like RAID00. :-) That's a would-be-nice thing, though. Two big drives will be fine.

Ideally, I'd like to be able to access the music files in iTunes as well, from multiple accounts on that box. That may involve importing the files and AAC encoding them (for the iPod) and then sharing <i>that</i> library with other users. Can you put songs from a someone else's shared library onto your iPod? Probably not. If so, then that wouldn't work, either. I'll have to think about that angle some more...

[mduell]

All you're talking about is a network share. You don't need to make the disks exclusively for sharing (actually I don't think you can), but you're welcome to just not use the disks for any other purpose. You can share files over various protocols including NFS (which most unixes support) and SMB (native for Windows). Creating a passwordless read-only account for network users is easy and would be a good idea.

OSX can do JBOD in software. I'd leave them as two seperate disks just because it's not worth the hassle to make them appear as one.

Sharing a music library between multiple iTunes accounts and iPods is a bit of a nightmare, especially if you have purchased any music from iTMS. There are hacks to work around it, but it feels like iTunes wasn't designed for multiple users and syncing multiple iPods with different playlists.

[Zoom]

For the Xbox and XBMC, I think I need to use SMB. Other potential devices would be the iTV or a Mac laptop using wifi.

So.... how does OSX manage permissions on secondary drives? I seem to recall that you can choose to ignore permissions on secondary drives when you create them, but I'm not sure. So if UserA has an account on the machine and a home directory on the main drive, and then creates files on a secondary drive, can UserB always see those files - or does OSX manage the permissions? Who "owns" that drive? Is it owned by the user that formatted it? If so, what are the permissions for other users?

I guess I can figure this out by actually doing it. But when you do SMB, you need to share it from a particular user's perspective, right? Which gives it an ID and pwd. Actually, I had to put a softlink in my user's home directory so that you could see the second drive from XBMC (got this off the web, works well). So, you have to attach to a user's home directory using SMB sharing and then the softlink jumps you off to the second drive. Did that work because the softlink was created by the person who formatted the drive, or because the second drive has no permissions, or because it has some default read access permissions?

[Laurence]

If you "get info" on the secondary drives there is a check box that says something like "ignore permissions on this volume" This does exactly what it says. You would then use something like "SharePoints" (Shareware software) to share the specific drives using AFP/SMB, etc... once they are shared any machine should be able to access them from anywhere.

For iTunes sharing between multiple accounts there are other apps to simplify the process. (ShareAlike is one I found quickly on versiontracker)

[Zoom]

Do I need SharePoints? Sounds like I really don't. It I created a user and then put a softlink in their directory, I could access them via SMB to their home directory.

Doesn't Sharepoints need to be running for the share to work? I need something that's always available.