With all the talk I’ve been doing about Windows Home Server, I neglected to mention my recent birthday and the awesome birthday present I picked up for myself.. hey… someone has to do it, right? I am the proud new owner of this beautiful 22″ wide flat screen monitor from HP. I highly recommend it, if you are in the market for a new monitor
I just noticed a search for “best motherboard for Windows Home Server” had led to this site. I would say from my experience: one that supports SATA 300 (sometimes called SATA II). Makes life easier when installing the big new hard drive(s) you are going to want.
On another WHS note: installing the connection software on a network computer automatically creates a shortcut to the shared drives on the server. However, does not automatically map those drives. Mapping must be done manually. Once a drive is mapped, I recommend a program like Microsoft SyncToy 2.0 beta or Replicator from Karen’s Power Tools. Both free tools do an excellent job of keeping files synced between local computer and mapped drive on the home server.
Once installed, all Home Server operations are performed remotely using the Windows Home Server Control Panel. The install preconfigures shared folders for Music, Photos, and Videos. Each new user is automatically assigned a personal folder. Screenshot here.
All of the initial setup is very user friendly. If you want web access to your files and even remote access/control of any defined computer on your network you need to open the necessary ports on your router. If your router supports UPnP as most new ones do, WHS can configure the router. If your router does not have that support, you will need to do this manually.
I have been running my server for just about a week now and so far no issues. I have not tried any of the add-on’s, there seem to be very few available at this point. I suspect many more are in the works and hope to try a few soon. Overall, I am very pleased with my decision to build this server.
As I posted before: after my visit to the HP solution center in Houston, I became quite intrigued by their MediaSmart Home Server (which I just noticed has already gone up $40 in price) running the new Microsoft Home Server software. Being the geek that I am, I knew I had to try it.
Rather than forking out the $710 (now $750) I decided to build my own. Since the hardware requirements are quite low, I decided to use an old machine I had laying around. First on the agenda was ordering up 2 new 500GB hard drives to allow plenty of storage. Next: even though I had already acquired an “evaluation copy” of Home Server, I decided to go legit and purchase an OEM copy (only license form currently available).
Time for assembly: the old computer had a Biostar motherboard, AMD Sempron 2.0GHz processor, and 512MB RAM. I replaced the tired old 60GB IDE hard drive with the two new 500GB SATA drives and booted it up. This is where I hit my first glitch. The old motherboard croaked on the SATA hard drives. Even throttled down to 1.5 transfer rate. One drive would work fine but, with both connected the system would crash during post. An email to Biostar Support (never answered) and a phone call to Seagate support (complete waste of time, the idiot ehhhh nice tech asked me if I wanted my SATA drive jumpered as master or slave). I quickly switched to plan B and moved those monster drives to a newer Celeron machine with 1GB RAM which had no problem with the drives running at the higher 3.0 transfer rate.
The Home Server software install went quite nicely, although it did seem slower than a typical XP install. Microsoft does not hide the fact that Home Server is built on Windows Small Business Server 2003 (the Server 2003 logo was seen several times during install). After installation, I simply had to install the network card driver and Home Server was up and running.
More thoughts and observations to follow….
I have blogged about Usenet Newsgroups before. I also intended on writing an article on getting started with newsgroups. Fortunately Giganews (my news server of choice) has has done that for me. They have created Usenet University, a great place for beginners to learn about newsgroups.
Wow, just returned from Houston and my first visit to the HP campus there. While there I was fortunate enough to get a tour of the very impressive HP Solution Center. The Solution Center showcases the latest and greatest in technology from HP. Everything from a 16 million dollar rack computer down to the newest Ipaqs. One piece of technology that really caught my eye was the new Mediasmart Server running Windows Home Server.
As with all new windows software, I’ll probably stay away from it for a while till they get the bugs worked out. However at $709.99 for a 1 TB server and prices sure to fall, this one may be hard to avoid for very long.
Gizmondo is having a Readers Computer Rig contest. The one pictured below is going to be hard to beat.
Of course this futuristic setup (not in the contest) from Intel, installed in an 8.5 million dollar NYC penthouse isn’t too bad either.
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