daywalker03's Fellowship of the Song

Good afternoon,

This is going to be a multiple vehicle installation thread, with additional notes on networking and audio input handling; I have some rather unique needs in the two vehicles, so I will be explaining these as I get to them. I will also be naming the individual computers and other items that will play major roles in the overall system with names taken from J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle-Earth stories, hence the thread title tribute to "The Fellowship of the Ring".

The system will consist of the following:

The home network, which the trucks will be a part of when in the driveway.
My 2003 Chevrolet S-10 pickup
My 2004 Chevrolet Trailblazer LS
My 1986 GMC Sierra Pickup

The home network will be divided into multiple sub-networks, since I don't want to run Cat5 network cable from where the master media server will be located to where the rest of the computers are. The computers on these two sub-networks are named as follows:
Sub-network one:
Galadriel (my mother's PC)
Elrond (My personal PC)
Sub-network two:
Gandalf (the master media server)

The CarPC's will be named as follows:
Strider (2003 S-10)
Frodo (2004 Trailblazer unit 1)
Samwise (2004 Trailblazer media server)
Gimli (1986 Sierra)

The portable units:
Merry (Acer AspireOne netbook)
Pippin (Acer Iconia A200 tablet)

I will start with the build up of Gandalf, since that is the key element in this system. I will also talk about how I handle having two CarPC's in a single vehicle with only one touchscreen monitor in use (hint: it's not as hard as it might seem at first). I may also include pictures of the hardware as I get time for it.

daywalker03

All right; time to talk about Gandalf and the house side of the network equation.

Gandalf the White:
The old ATX tower case I'm using is from an old Gateway PC; it's got 4 external 5.25 in drive bays which hold a number of DVD/CD drives, only two of which will be hooked up. To this, I have added an Antec VP450 450 Watt power supply, an Asus/HP M2N68-LA motherboard with an AMD Sempron 3400+ CPU, and a 500GB Seagate Barracuda SATA hard drive. I may disable one of the DVD drives and use an 80GB Western Digital Caviar IDE drive as the boot/OS drive and leave the whole Seagate for the media storage; I haven't decided yet. I will be using the integrated LAN connection to connect to a Linksys E2500 router that will be flashed with the DD-WRT firmware so I can create a wireless bridge network; a similar router will be installed in the 2004 Trailblazer so that Frodo and Samwise can be kept updated.

Galadriel:
This computer is simply going to be a media client, but it's built around an older eMachines system, with RAM and HD changes that I made to improve its performance. It will be connected to the LAN on another Linksys E2500 that is the main access to the internet for every other computer and wifi device in the house.

Elrond:
My own personal system, which is where I am doing the preliminary testing for the CarPC front end I will be using in my vehicles. It is connected to the LAN via wifi full time, as I don't much care to wire the room for a LAN until I'm ready to remodel the house.