[Rack] fixed: horsy audio and video

[Rubin Abdi]

Thanks for the work, awesome!

Patrick Keys wrote, On 20101127 042551:
> * Microphone option needs to stay muted in the Volume controls.
> * Loud hiss noise from speakers when microphone option isn't muted.

The original setup was to use the line-in for iPod and other portal
media devices. The hissing wasn't super bad back in the day, but annoying.

> * Debian on horsy is lenny, which is two years old.

When I had set this up I went with testing, I wonder who's rebuilt the
machine with Lenny?

> * Videos seem to be stored completely on pony, not horsy. They should 
> probably be moved directly to horsy to reduce unnecessary network traffic.
> * horsy could also probably use a bigger chassis with room for a dvd 
> drive and extra hard drives. i might grab an extra chassis and work on 
> this myself unless somebody has any objections. let me know.

Logically we (I) decided to keep all videos on Pony because:

1. Keeping large files in one central location seems smart.
2. Many more people have shell access on Pony, I didn't want to recreate
users on Horsy every time someone wanted to dump a video to watch.
3. Pony is in the rack, kind of hard to pull out and mistakenly turn it
into a robot. Horsy is very much out in the open, I've already been
bugged by a number of people wanting to reuse that machine for other
purposes. Keeping all of the video content on there means whenever
(eventually it'll happen) someone decides to dismantle Horsy for the
sheer joy of it, to steal parts or simply to fix a problem without
paying attention, all of those videos may disappear in the hack shelf or
get written over through a format.
4. Horsy's hardware and current software setup is cheap and very easily
replaceable, replacing 561GB of video content isn't.

Network traffic is pretty unnoticeable, as I've been convinced by Jason
Spence. Even at its worse, a 2 hour long 7GB HD movie means about
10mbit/s over our 100mbit ethernet network.

A DVD drive was not put into Horsy because fuck optical media.

Feel free to do whatever you like to Horsy (I myself really appreciate
the work you've put in so far and your ability to communicate changes
back here), but keep the logic of the elders in mind. Also if you do end
up placing the videos onto Horsy, I'd appreciate it if you left what is
on Pony still on Pony, only copy or rsync.

Thanks again!

-- 
Rubin Abdi
rubin at starset.net