Alx9r's Sample Setup Design Rationale

Alx9r's Sample Setup

System Diagram

There are some decisions that I made when designing my system whose importance might not be obvious just by reading about how I set the system up. I have tried to describe the motivation behind those decisions here.

Network Topology

If you have looked at my system diagram you might have noticed that I use a dedicated wireless router to connect my home to the internet. As far as I know, a LinuxMCE core is quite a capable router (surely more capable than my WRT54GL) and I would guess other LinuxMCE users are using their cores as their main router to the outside world.

I chose not to use my LinuxMCE core as my main router to the outside world for this reason: My core spends a lot of time in the down state, mostly because I end up tinkering with it to get it running just right. Whenever my core is down (i.e. when rebooting, installing LinuxMCE fresh) it will not operate as a router, and no one in the house can use the internet. It was simply impractical to go without internet whenever my core was down.

Hard Drive Configuration

Look here for the rationale behind my hard drive configuration.