In the office environment the USB devices attached to different hosts can be shared among hosts through the local area network. With USB transaction relay technique, all the frequently used USB devices can be grouped together as some sort of virtual USB server. The USB devices in this virtual server can be accessed by any office member using the USB client. A virtual USB host driver under Windows OS is implemented to enumerate the virtual USB devices from the client side. The enumerated virtual device will mimic the real counterpart and the original device driver can be applied without any modification. Theoretically almost all the USB devices without strict timing requirements can be shared with this USB device sharing system. To release the inconvenience of exclusive access properties caused by the nature of the USB protocol, certain management functions are introduced.

Scheduled recording is a major function of the personal video recording (PVR) system. UPnP is a novel networking and content sharing standard for digital home applications with its main feature, the automatic discovery technique, allowing client users to fast deploy and easily access multimedia resources shared by UPnP media servers. To support scheduled recording, the UPnP AV scheduled recording standard is specified by UPnP forum to extend the server capability to incorporate this functionality. This paper completes a minimum implementation of UPnP AV scheduled recording service and evaluates the performance of this recording service and the qualities of recorded video.

Media Streaming is getting popular and feasible because of the higher network bandwidth. The supported media formats also increase rapidly. The end user on the streaming client side seldom realizes that the reason certain media content can not be rendered on the computers is due to the lack of the corresponding decoder. As a result, the ability to determine the media contents that streaming client can support and how to negotiate with streaming servers for compatible media format will ease the use of streaming. This paper proposes a solution based on Microsoft DirectShow which can test if the specified media format, for example, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-2 transport stream etc, is supported. By obtaining this information, streaming servers can trans-code media contents to the specified media format that the streaming clients supported. Also, this information can be used to offer other streaming mechanism such as UPnP.

The Apache server combining with MySQL and PHP has becoming a new platform, the LAMP for Web based applications. The platform level security had been dealt with by the security improvement of the OS, firewall and HTTP server. Yet the application level security problems seemed to be overlooked. In this paper an application level security mechanism using once-only URL is proposed. Also an Apache plug-in module to support this mechanism is developed and implemented.

When the DLNA products join the intranet of the home network, the attack from the internet will follow before one knows it. This paper will propose a design of a personal firewall for the Digital Media Server (DMS) providing the DLNA services. Unlike traditional firewall, the access control list of this firewall can be easily configured and updated. The key concept of the design is to mimic the contact list used in the instant messaging system. If a Digital Media Controller (DMC) is added to the contact list of the DMS, this DMC can control and manage the media in the DMS. Also the DMS can reject the accessing of a DMC on the contact list by temporarily blocking.

Flash memory is widely adopted in various consumer products for information storage, especially for embedded systems. With strong demands on product designs for overhead control and performance requirements, vendors must have an effective design for the mapping of logical block addresses (LBA's) and physical addresses of data over flash memory. This paper targets such an essential issue by proposing a configurable mapping method that could trade the main-memory overhead with the system performance under the best needs of vendors. A series of experiments is conducted to provide insights on different configurations and the proposed method, compared to existing implementations.

This paper designs and implements a chronological web server based on Apache HTTP Server to provide a platform for chronological web application development. This platform is inspired by versioning file system and temporal database but support totally different functions. Chronological web server with script-capability is a platform on which a web programmer can easily develop web applications that support reference timeline setting and chronological caching. Not only static files, this platform stores all versions of script embedded pages and provides script parsing and interpreting. Once a user sets up his reference timeline, he will be capable of going through back-tothe- past experience. Furthermore, we can also configure our web application to distinguish users from different timelines so that various operating styles and authorization rules for different timelines can be implemented effortlessly.

The DHCP (dynamic host configuration protocol) is widely deployed in resource allocation and intranet management. However the DHCP mechanism is not mandatory and the DHCP server can neither force DHCP clients to release their leases, nor enforce cooperation from externally configured hosts that are DHCP-unaware. Although new DHCP options such as DHCP reconfigure extension have been proposed, the basic problems inherent in DHCP mechanism cannot be solved without first strengthening its operations. In the paper a DHCP-based infrastructure for intranet management is proposed by combining the resource allocation functions of the DHCP server with the packet filtering features of MAC (Medium Access Control) bridges such as Ethernet switches and wireless access points. DHCP clients and DHCP-unaware hosts that do not abide by the DHCP mechanism or our management policy will be denied network accesses by MAC bridges. Resource allocation and access control can be integrated and local configuration conflicts can be reduced to the minimum.