Yeah, I pointed out the downspout issue to the builder. He said the gutter guys never connect them to drains. The other issue (not clear in the angle of the shot) is they they installed oversize gutters instead of regular ones as they were told, so they need to use special adapters to make them connect to the drain pipes. Good deal for mom as that would have been a $1000 up charge if we had requested it.
As for the equipment that will go in the rack, it will be the following:
- A/V Receiver (probably recycle the one she has now as it already features HDMI switching for 3 sources, might be 2, will have to check)
- Direct TV HD DVR (free when they do the install)
- HTPC - will need to build a new one to replace her mid size tower monster she has now
- Blu-ray player
- Audio amp for other zones (She already has a Yamaha amp for this)
Not everything is rack mountable, but I got several of those Mid-Atlantic rack shelves for those items. I'll then use filler plates as needed to seal up any unused rack units. Today she got a bunch of different sized internal and external HDs scattered between her office PC and mid tower PC for audio and video storage. Will likely consolidate all those into a storage server in the office, or make the office PC the file server for everything. With the demise of WHS, perhaps I'll upgrade mom to Windows 8 and run
Storage Spaces, that lets you manage multiple hard drives as one virtual drive.
Hmm, now that I think about it, her current method of switching between sources, let alone zone is pretty bad, so I'll probably look into upgrading the AV receiver to something with multiple zones, but to get one that can stream HDMI audio from the HTPC cost real money. All the entry level AV receivers can only stream analog audio to other zones. Anyway, we're probably getting way off topic for at least another 3 weeks.
All Ethernet will be home run to the office where I'll have a small switch and AP (Wireless Access Point).