If you are recycling one of your old machine to be used as your Windows Home Server box. But also want to give it a hot-swap functionality (like HP MediaSmart Server), I would recommend getting one of those multi-bay hot swap HDD racks. There are quite a bunch available at reasonable prices. The advantages these offer include -

• You don’t have to shut down the server to replace/remove/add hard drives.
• You don’t have to open the case every time you want to add/remove storage.
• You may see the activity on each drive individually (depending on whether the rack supports it).

Here are some available on Amazon.

You can find some more on other stores like newegg and tigerdirect.

Posted by admin as Network, system, windows at 8:31 AM MST

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Yes! The new member of my network is a Windows Home Server.

If you are like most people, you probably fall under one of the two categories - people who do not back up or the people who do not back up soon enough. Till about a few years ago, my idea of back up was just copying data to an external hard drive or burn DVDs. That was till a friend of mine lost a lot of invaluable data (mainly pictures) due to crash of his external hard drive. It was then that I started backing up data online with one of those free web space providers. But there is only limited data you can backup there. Also I could not back-up as often I would like to as it takes a lot of time to manually upload (no automated service from my provider). It was then, that I started using a old box for a file and backup server.

I am currently running a file server on my linux box for back-up and file sharing. I had been wanting to try out the Windows Home Server product, for the same. It is basically a stripped down version of Windows Server 2003, hence based on a very stable, well tested platform. Another reason for switching was that since I changed my jobs last year, I haven’t worked on linux and am kind of drifting away from the latest in that market. I had two options, I could just get a out-of-the-box Windows Home Server or go with a home brewed server. I decided go with the latter for 2 main reasons - one, I was going to recycle a lot hardware that I already have for it, so it would be cheaper and second, this way I will be able to learn more about the product and its internal workings.

Step 1 - the Hardware
I am going to use the current file server box for the installation. The specs are quite low but so are the minimum requirements of the Operating System. Here are the specs -

• AM64 3700+ Socket 754 Single core processor
• Gigabyte K8U motherboard with (only) 2 SATA ports.
• Generic 1GB PC3200 RAM
• Generic Power Supply
• Generic Case
• 1 X 80GB ATA100 Hard Disk Drive(this had the linux installation on it)
• 1 X 500GB SATA Hard Disk Drive

Step 2 - Installation
Since I am not going to use a DVD drive on the server after the installation, I just borrowed on from my other system. Here is how it went. First I decided to install the OS on the 500GB drive to avoid hitting the copy size “Wall” (more on that here). But I faced a issue in that right away. Apparently WHS does not like my motherboard’s chipset. There are no drivers available for the SATA on Windows Server 2003 platform. A little search showed that there are issues with the SATA drivers for the Uli chipset. So I ended up moving a spare 200GB ATA133 HDD from another system to this and using it as the sys drive.

So I popped in the disk again and after a couple of questions in the beginning, the installation process begun. After about 1.5 hrs and a couple of reboots, I was logged in. now comes the next step. I connected the 500GB hard drive, and surprisingly it got recognized. I added it to the storage handled by WHS. and now I have 700GB of storage on the Home Server.

Step 3 - Configuration
The network configuration was easy. WHS auto-configured my router Netgear WGR614 using uPnP. I got a subdomain registered for my home server. Microsoft provides you a free subdomain - <subdomain>.homeserver.com. Through that you can log into your home server and other systems through it. All you need to do is enable remote access for your computers.

Next I enabled the back-up for my systems. Also copied the media on the home server so that I can access all my songs, photos and videos over the network and play it on my HDTV through my Media Center PC. I also created a couple of guest accounts that I can give to my family/friends to share my pics with them rather than loading them to an online gallery.

I have to say that the installation and configuration went with no-hassle (except the non-available drivers for the SATA during installation). The configuration was a breeze.

Step 4 - Installing Add-Ons
Now I need to install various Add-Ons already available for the platform. The best site I would recommend for finding a comprehensive list of the Add-In’s and other tweaks you can do with WHS, would be We Got Served. I will be trying these over the next few weeks and posting about them. So stay tuned.

My opinion so far - Windows Home Server is a really good product based on a well tested platform. The functionality it delivers is highly beneficial in today’s day and age everyone has multiple computers and media extenders and want common storage and back-up, and don’t want to spend too much time maintaining it. But as any other Microsoft product, it has some issues and some bugs. So wait for Power Pack 1, and we should see a really stable product, which does not have any current competition in the market.

For those who do not want to go through doing this and want a good out-of-the-box product with support, can get the HP Mediasmart Server. It is priced very decently and has a really small form-factor.

Posted by admin as system, windows at 12:09 AM MST

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