Setting up a Home Media Server / Player using FreeNAS, OpenELEC XBMC & (PXE) Network Booting
OVERVIEW:
Over the years I have used many different Network Media Players, both PC and hardware based systems. So far for ease of use and operation, including the ability to load ISO files directly of your media library. I find XBMC (Xbox Media Centre) one of the best around. With the available cut down versions like OpenELEC, capable of running from flash card or USB drives or in this case over the Network.
In this document I will give a guide into getting a home media server working and booting from Network Boot (PXE). With some more work you could expand on this guide, enabling Network Booting of many other Utilities or Operating Systems.
For those who are not familiar with PXE (Pre eXecution Environment) it has been around since about 1999-2000. PXE can be used on any system that supports PXE booting in the System Bios. Normally it can be set as the default boot option if needed, or selected via boot options on pressing the F12 button or similar on staring your PC.
PXE can be used for many things and once setup on your network can be a very handy tool. For example if you have multiple identical PCs, you could setup one pc as you like, then image that PC with a server such as FOG (a free Linux Imaging solution). (although I have setup FOG in the past I will not be covering that here)
Along with imaging solutions PXE can boot multiple Operating Systems over the network. Generally they would be cut down versions, they could be anything from system diagnostics utilities through to media players like OpenELEC, as in this example.
Multiple boot options can be setup on a selectable menu system, this allows any number of boot options from the same PXE server. In this example I am using my FreeNAS Server as the PXE Server.
The things needed to enable PXE booting on your network are as follow:
- A DHCP Server that can pass DHCP Options to client PCs.
- A TFTP Server.
- A File Server that can share NFS file shares.
- Some time and patients :-)
In this guide I am not going to cover multiple Server/File Server setups, as you should be able to work out what is needed on your Network from this guide. If already running a standard hardware based file Server with your Music etc already loaded, maybe that server can already share the TFTP and NFS. All you would need in that scenario is a DHCP server that can be setup to pass the PXE options to your PCs.