What’s the EPIA MII supposed to do?

Due to its connectivity options (Ethernet onboard, WLAN addable via PCI card, CardBus slot or USB for UMTS adapter, possibly even a CompactFlash adapter) the EPIA MII suggests itself, of course, as a router device and that’s what it was originally intended for. However, now in the first place it’ll have a slightly different assignment.

At my GF’s place, we do have Internet there via the neighbour’s WLAN, so no need to do routing right now but possibly at a later time. Instead, there is a reality-driven requirement of some sort of network storage. She used to attach an external USB hard drive to her laptop which pretty much defeats any mobility aspects. The goal of additional external storage and backup can be much more elegantly achieved by having a NAS accessible via the WLAN. The Travla case has space for one 3,5″ drive only but I wanted RAID-1, so I put in 2 2,5″ drives, which will be made accessible to the Windows clients via Samba.

But there’s even more cables due to external speakers. These were necessary because the laptop’s built-in speakers not only would have sounded poor, they’re actually not really working any more at all. Now the external speakers don’t really excel either, of course, and if you have a proper HiFi system, you’d want to take advantage of it. So another application (for the time being) will be to become the endpoint of Audio streaming. From what I’ve read, esound and an appropriate WinAmp plugin would be the way to go.

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