Most parks have cable television plumbed to the pedestals of each site which is not useful for anything more than watching basic TV.  Satellite systems on your roof are always an option, if you can’t risk being without entertainment.  While the quest for worthwhile internet is an ongoing subject through out our travels, our supply of entertainment is fortunately handy and abundant!

We, of course, went the full-on nerd route… a 20+TB Linux server full of ISO’s of our DVD movie and television collections! This was the server in our old Houston apartment so it was never designed with the intention of RV life.  However, it’s certainly helped us take a step towards our eventual goal… an RV-specific entertainment solution!

Our entertainment and backup server for now

Oak is our oversized server that handles backups and serving out DVD’s at night.

The overview of it’s specs are:

  • CentOS Linux 7.x
  • AMD A6-5400K
  • 8 GB DDR3
  • 500 GB SSD ‘/’
  • 20+ TB RAID5 ‘/storage’
  • APC UPS
  • ASUS AC3200 router

It’s far more useful when it has an internet connection, but that is problematic for even laptops in the RV. For now, it lives on it’s own closed LAN with a WiFi router which allows us to view media and connect for backups when necessary.

Eventually, the plan is to put this server in it’s new permanent home in California with a friend. Once it has reliable access again, it will finally be able to perform all it’s normal functions and we’ll be able to connect to it from wherever we are (as long as we are successful in our internet quest!)

After that, we’ll work on a new system for the RV to compliment this server. My future plans include putting together a system with 3 or 4 TB of RAID SSD in a very small form factor allowing it to be mounted in the RV, somewhere out of the way. If at all possible, this new system will have the ability to run it on 12v power. I might be shooting for the stars, but hey… we’ll see what we can pull off!

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