Advanced home network setup.

[stephan123789]

Currently I have the following:

• MWEB FON router
• 3 PC's with lan cabels to modem, all with Gigabit ports
• 2 laptops and 2 smartphones.
• Samsung Smart TV ( 7Series)
• Raspberry Pi with Raspbian
• Two laptops
• Extra portable drive.
• A lot of LAN cables.

The back-story:

I live in an apartment with 1 other guy. We have a 4mbps adsl line and we share our internet with our neighbor living underneath us. We currently have LAN cables from all our PC's to the router, using 3 of the 4 available ports. The last port is used by the TV. The Raspberry Pi has not yet been added to the network, but will as soon as I am done programming it.

The Raspberry Pi will be used for two things:
Downloading torrents and storing/sharing movies/series/downloaded contents. The external portable drive will be connected to the Raspberry Pi, and all shared movies and downloaded content will be accessed through the Raspberry Pi. The Idea is that all 3 of us can access all downloaded content for a central point.

Requirements:
We need a Gigabit network between the 3 Computers and the TV.
Be able to view shared files from the Raspberry Pi on the TV.

Questions:

1. Any suggestions for a cheap 5-port gigabit hub that can support the abuse of 3 pc's and a TV?
I came across this "D-Link DGS-1005D" . Should I rather spend more money on something more expensive, or will this hub last a few years while giving excellent performance? We need our network speeds to be as fast as possible since we do copy a lot of large files between computers. (Mostly VM's for work purposes). On another note, 5 port vs 8 port? Any 8 port hubs suggestions will be appreciated.

2. Any suggestions for setting up the Raspberry Pi for torrenting? I am currently following this guide:
http://www.howtogeek.com/142044/how-to-turn-a-raspberry-pi-into-an-always-on-bittorrent-box/
I have not completed it yet, I still need to set up the hard drive and torrent client on the Raspberry Pi. It seems straight forward and should work for my downloading needs. Any suggestions will be welcome for using another approach.

3. FON router Wi-FI vs other Wi-Fi source: since the FON router is free, I am sure that it's Wi-Fi is not the best there is. I don't know much about Wi-Fi technology, but I know that some are better then others. I know that my old free Telkom router gave a lot of issues with it's WiFi, causing connection lost while the lan cables never gave any issues. The reason why I bring this up is that I have seen some gigabit hubs with built in Wi-Fi that seems to be better then the router's Wi-Fi, might have been a range extender of some sort.

4. Viewing files/movies on the TV.
I can play a movie from my windows pc to my tv by simply right clicking on a video file and say "play to tv". This will open the native tv video player and start to play my movie. Note that this does not work for all video formats. I cal also access the shared files on my computer directly from the TV's UI. This works either through the Samsung software(All Share) installed on my computer, or just through the windows file sharing system. I would like to do something similar between the Raspberry Pi and the tv. Have anyone done something like this before and have any tips on how to get this to work?

 

[Tinuva]

2. Any suggestions for setting up the Raspberry Pi for torrenting? I am currently following this guide:
http://www.howtogeek.com/142044/how-to-turn-a-raspberry-pi-into-an-always-on-bittorrent-box/
I have not completed it yet, I still need to set up the hard drive and torrent client on the Raspberry Pi. It seems straight forward and should work for my downloading needs. Any suggestions will be welcome for using another approach.

Deluge is meh.

If you can find transmission-daemon, it is way more awesome, especially the later versions. Then you can use Transmission-gui with it from your Windows/Linux desktop, which looks very similar to uTorrent, so you will feel right at home.

You can still follow the 1st few guides on there, like to get remote access ect to your pi. Then follow a transmission guide like this:
http://www.robertsetiadi.net/installing-transmission-in-raspberry-pi/
It doesn't have pretty pictures, but Transmission trumps Deluge in all possible ways for me.

 

[Drunkard #1]

1. Any suggestions for a cheap 5-port gigabit hub that can support the abuse of 3 pc's and a TV?
I came across this "D-Link DGS-1005D" . Should I rather spend more money on something more expensive, or will this hub last a few years while giving excellent performance? We need our network speeds to be as fast as possible since we do copy a lot of large files between computers. (Mostly VM's for work purposes). On another note, 5 port vs 8 port? Any 8 port hubs suggestions will be appreciated.

I have that 5 port switch. It runs fine, just like the 8 port version (DGS-1008D, I'm guessing), which is the one you should get. I'm alone in the house, and I'm running both (11 ports total).

 

[agentrfr]

Use a simple 8 port hub. No need to get fancy. I currently use this one in a similar set-up and it does its job perfectly: http://www.rebeltech.co.za/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=45_50&products_id=2941

I also have a Pi in almost the exact same setup. I have a deluge server running on it for torrents, and it is hooked up to nzbsa, sickbeard and couchpotato for automated usenet fetching. My Pi is hooked up into an external hard drive docking bay, with a 4TB drive in it.

Beware that you might have issues mounting a drive larger than 2TB using the usual methods to set it up as a writeable FTP host. I had to fiddle quite a bit to mount the 4TB drive AND allow permissions to the guest account which allowed writing - still not quite sure how I got it to work exactly...

 

[agentrfr]

Also, get another Pi and plug it into your TV and run XBMC on it. No need to worry about file formats - and it is far more pretty (a bluetooth remote and dongle for the Pi is a good idea). We currently have an Apple TV2 jailbroken and running XBMC on the big TV. It reads straight off the server Pi and runs great!

 

[stephan123789]

Thanks for all the replies, I will probaly get to work on this over the next two weeks. Will let you know how it went.