Consolidation Strategy For Automation PCs

upstatemike

Senior Member
I need to rethink my allocation of PCs for various automation functions to see if I can reduce the number of machines I have running 24/7. The way things are divided up now is:

1- Primary Control PC
This machine hosts programs that talk to my Stargate using the Stargate COM1 port (primary programming port). This would include the Stargate WinEVM program and Homeseer with the Stargate plugin. It also holds wav files, batch files and helper programs.

2- Secondary Control PC
This machine hosts Virtual Weather Station and programs that communicate with
Stargate over the network interface or through a general purpose (non-programming) Stargate serial port. PowerHome lives here and this is where I would experiment twith things like StarCOM, xPLHAL, and Adaptive Home Logic.

3- Media PC
This currently hosts my Slimserver and is where I would experiment with things like CQC, and PVR apps.

4- Human Interface PC
I will probably use my main workstation (which runs 24/7) to also experiment with HomRunner and MainLobby. This machine is up in my Office/Media Room rather than the server room.

5- Camera PC
This PC does not exist yet and is the reason I am trying to reconfigure stuff. 5 PCs is probably too many but I'm not sure where I can put this without disrupting critical functions on the other boxes. Do most people dedicate a PC to CCTV tasks or can it be shared? If I move Virtual Weather Station onto my Primary Control PC, will the camera stuff play well with PowerHome?

Seems like I should be able to knock this down to 3 PCs but I don't want to take any performance or reliability hits. How is everybody else allocating their PC resources?
 
I think you do more than I, but here's my breakdown. There's 3 "real" PC's, 2 touchpanels here.

1) Main Server. Runs CQC, SageTV, has all RS232 appliances hooked up to it. It's a midget of a box - AMD2500, 512MB RAM, 1TB of space all for TV, well 35GB for mp3's. I'm going to hook this up as video renderer #2, so that I can watch a 2nd concurrent TV/DVD stream.
2) CCTV/File Server: Runs (will run) Diginet, has ~1.5TB of space. Holds all the DVDs.
3) HD-HTPC driver: This drives the plasma in HD [well, ED - it's 852x480]. It also has about .75TB in DVDs stored.
4) Fujitsu 3400 touchpanel. not sure if you classify this as a PC since it's so low power, but it's technically a PC so i'm listing it. We interact with it several times a day so it's more of our Human Interface PC than anything else. It turns off screen/HD after a few mins, so it really drains very little power.
5) 2nd 3400 that I just bought. I'll probably leave this off/in suspend mode as it's for 2ndary rooms which by def'n won't be used much.

I also have 2 other machines that I consider "outside" my setup, such as my laptop and my office PC, but those are off unless we turn them on, so there's no power/reliability/performance aspects to them.

Other than the 3400's, I don't have any other dedicated Human Interface pc's. Why would you allocate one to that? Seems like more of a dev box than anything else.
 
I know how you feel on this topic. I have been battling the decision of server consolidation for a while now. I simply refuse to potential performance hit or outage. I do not want to have my cameras or HTPC stop working when I have to reboot homeseer. I have considered VMWare for certain tasks, but I am always let down by the limited hardware capabilities (such as only one sound card per VM)
I have a seperate computer for my cameras, it's a linux box running zoneminder software.
 
I can only comment on my CCTC box, but I consider that functionality CRITICAL, and therefore I keep it as a standalone. First time you're ripped off and the cams aren't working.........

I feel your pain. I think I will try to combine my future HTPC and PwrHm boxes (these are important, they AREN'T security critical). More sensative task remain with the Elk.
 
Great question, I'm battling the same thing. In fact, I just touched on these questions partway down in this thread at Cinemar last night. I'd really like to keep it down to two 24x7 PCs if possible. At this point, I'm considering running Homeseer on the 24x7 PC in the kitchen (which doesn't do much else beyond having a bunch of hard drives for central storage, and light web browsing & email). I'm thinking about running ML server on my second 24x7 machine, which is connected to my HT gear in the den, and will probably begin to start doing more media work. I have a few concerns over video tasks possibly intermittently putting too much load on that for ML server to run reliably, but it's a dual core 2.8ghz machine, so maybe it can handle it. Ultimately, I'd like to add some surveillance, but don't want to add yet another 24x7 pc for that... perhaps I'll use IP cameras.

Thoughts?
 
I have most of my eggs in one basket for now: PowerHome, personal web server, music server, whole-house audio (Winamp + BrowseAmp), video server (only a couple DVD's), and cams (external, 16-channel mux). I also hung a Slingbox on my network instead of adding more video to this machine.

I've wanted to split some of this up for a bit, but have not sat down and thought about it much.

I figure I can offload at least the music server portion to my little HP EPC that I run my foyer touch screen with, since it does nothing else (the slacker).
 
TonyNo said:
I have most of my eggs in one basket for now: PowerHome, personal web server, music server, whole-house audio (Winamp + BrowseAmp), video server (only a couple DVD's), and cams (external, 16-channel mux). I also hung a Slingbox on my network instead of adding more video to this machine.

I've wanted to split some of this up for a bit, but have not sat down and thought about it much.

I figure I can offload at least the music server portion to my little HP EPC that I run my foyer touch screen with, since it does nothing else (the slacker).
So you must be running one of those nitrogen cooled Cray Super PCs!
 
Heh. Nah. Compaq Presario 2.2GHz AMD system. $500 special from Circuit City about two years ago. Does everything pretty well so far. That external camera mux helps a lot, I'm sure. Got a great deal on it used ($100).

My two kids also have systems, but I could not offload too much there. My daughter typically runs about 6-8 AIM windows, listens to music, and edits her web page/blog all the time. My son listens to music, runs Yahoo Messenger, AIM, and plays Maple Story. :D
 
OK. If it works for you then maybe I can get away with one "master" PC to run everything. I'm going to take a spare box and load it up as follows:

Slimserver - Streams music to my Squeezebox music players
PlutoHome - to control slimserver
xPLHAL - to display text messages on Squeezebox displays
Virtual Weather Station - collects weather data from RainWise weather station
Homeseer with Stargate Plugin - interface to Stargate plus TTS functions
MainLobby - Touchscreen interface to Homeseer
HomeRunner - Touchscreeen interface to Stargate
PowerHome - Insteon management and control, processes VWS data
HomeVoice - Voice Recognition software
Adaptive Home Logic - To manage serial communications with misc. devices
CQC - to manage my DVD changer
ECS - to download and process weather forecasts
Home Domination - to manage email

How much RAM do you think this will require?
 
Wow. That is a lot of stuff! :)

Are you just not interested in software consolidation?

PH can do a lot of that (VR, serial comms, scraping weather forecasts), as I'm sure some of the others could, too.

I also neglected to mention some other things running on that machine: handle CID with PH, TTS announcements with PH, WWA monitoring with PH, WeatherWatcher for pretty touch screen weather pages, WebCam 2000 for cams, a Dynamic IP app, and BluetoothLock for future projects.

I'm running 512M RAM.
 
I have nothing against Software consolidation. I am just leaving all my options open because I haven't verified what the correct software combination should be. I am pretty open to any solution as long as it supports my core "non-negotiable" requirements:

1- Must talk to my Stargate. The other hardware alternatives have been explored exaustively in other threads and right now there is no viable substitute so this is set in stone for now.

2- Must talk to Slimserver. I have looked at all the alternatives to the Squeezebox music players and none have the audiophile DAC, bright display, and flexibility of this music solution.

3- Must talk to RainWise Weather station, either directly or through VWS.

4- Must provide a TTS solution that lets me change voices on the fly so different types of announcements can have different voices. TTS must also be able to say variable values fed from Stargate.

5- Must provide weather forecast and news from the Internet.

6- Must provide Voice Recognition option.

Beyond that I am pretty flexible as to what I will consider. Still looking for the one HA app that can do all of the above.
 
Are you looking for support of these in a ready-made fashion? In other words, no programming by you?

I can address the ones I know...

3. The Rainwise protocol seems pretty easy to implement.

4a. PH can't do this yet, AFAIK.

5. I do this now with weather; news should be very similar.

6. PH's VR uses the MS engine.
 
i am running on my HA server:

starCOM - for my timecommander+
xPLHAL - to interface between xPL & xAP apps on this machine & on the network
HAL deluxe - VR, telephony
TTS - at&t natural voices via xPL TTS
IIS - running my HA web interface
security cams - via 2 cascaded 4x1 video switchers
baby monitor - audio from baby's camera
TVersity media server - for video to dlink dsm-320
backup & file server
windows media encoder - to stream video for me to watch @ work :)

it's a 2.6 ghz celeron w/ 1 gig memory & 500 gb of disk running win2k

i am thinking of putting slimserver & medianet on there as well :p
 
Well, I know i'm a big CQC fan and all, but I'm an even bigger fan of removing points of failure. I'd be worried about programs bumping up against each other. If the only thing you're looking to do with CQC is manage a DVD changer, and if you're getting MainLobby to deal with HomeSeer, why not use MainLobby's DVDChanger plugin?
 
TonyNo said:
Are you looking for support of these in a ready-made fashion? In other words, no programming by you?

I can address the ones I know...

3. The Rainwise protocol seems pretty easy to implement.

4a. PH can't do this yet, AFAIK.

5. I do this now with weather; news should be very similar.

6. PH's VR uses the MS engine.
Dave already fixed me up for the RainWise through VWS (Works really well) so it is just 1 and 2 for PowerHome. I could probably do the Slimserver stuff by kicking off batchfiles to send xPL messages the way I do now from WinEVM.

The challenge is the communications to my Stargate. I looked at the PowerHome COM object and it had like 20 parameters you need to set to send something out of the serial port so I have put that on the back burner to study when I have tons of time to get into it.
 
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