Daily Archives: April 20, 2014

A little performance suggestion for XBMC

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I love the XBMC media center and it’s the best I have seen so far.

But I have alway thought it was a little slow when starting playing media and upgrading the library was a killer.

I have read a lot about how to setup XBMC on remote shares and every body was pointing out: Always use Samda to connect to your media.

I have a Synology box with all my media and it can use Samba as well as NFS.
But of cause I used Samba to connect to it from my mediacenter and PC’s.

The reason to use Samba was the problem with Upper/Lower case letters in media names.

I was thinking a bit about this and found that it was not a problem for me.
I have a lot of CD’s and when I ripped them I always organize them with MusicBrainz Picard so I knew exactly where the media is stored.

I tried to connect to the Synology box using NFS and to my surprise media started playing right away.

My head had to banged into the wall a couple of times because all the time I have spend trying to optimize network, MySQL and buying memory for the Synology box. :mrgreen:

 

A little surprise from a Windows machine

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I upgraded Kubuntu to 14.04 LTE and everything went smooth.
But after a day or so the Internet access was getting slower and slower.

I blamed everything and regretting upgrading Kubuntu.

DNS/DHCP server had no problems and the Internet provider had no problems either.
A Internet speed test had problems pinging and connecting but the speed was normal.
Checked my router everything looked normal until I got to the UPnp section.

I found 2 unauthorized port (50.000 something) opened by an IP I didn’t knew of.

The DNS server told me it was my virtual windows machine I use to update my Harmony remote.

I disable UPnp and rebooted the router and after a while everything started to be normal.

I had enabled Upnp so it was easy for me to update the port forwarding to my Synology box.

So the lesson learned is never be lacy when it comes to network safety.
From now on everything will be configured manually.

And NO, I don’t regretting upgrade Kubuntu even I can’t see the big difference 🙂
The little Windows machine will have to undergo some torture so I can find the little bugger 😈