Windows Home Server
Apr. 1st, 2009 12:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
walbournOnce upon a time I had a home server. It was a machine we used back in the Charybdis days, and I kept hacking it up to keep it running. Because I had an MSDN subscription, I had various flavors of Windows 2000 Server running on it until eventually the hardware became too old. It was noisy. It was flakey. It was becoming annoying. I dumped it a few years back.
I've been meaning to find some kind of back-up solution for my main system, and researching it I heard good things about Windows Home Server. WHS is a version of Windows Server 2003 with a bunch of home-network focused software. I picked up a barebones system with two 200 GB Hard drives and a good-quality power supply for about $375 and a copy of WHS from the MS Company Store. You only need a keyboard, monitor, and mouse to do the setup and I used a USB stick to install the software (the system doesn't have a floppy disk or a CD/DVD drive).
All-in-all WHS fairly easy to setup, and the Home Server Connection software used to remotely administer it works well on my Windows Vista x64 main machine. I ran into two issues:
- Driver support is less than ideal. Windows Server drivers are touch and go to find, and many companies appear to punt support on it assuming they are never needed for consumer-grade hardware. For the NVIDIA motherboard and NETGEAR adapter I had to manually install Windows XP drivers, and the NETGEAR adapter still doesn't work for some mysterious reason. The motherboard LAN does, so that's good enough for now.
- Trying to configure the second drive is proving a pain. It failed to automatically create the second volume during setup for some reason, and it requires a strange mix of manual partitioning and then Home Server Connection configuration to add one.
So far WHS is really a nice solution for home system backup, media sharing, and file server. It's easy to administer and configure. Setting one up from scratch, however, requires more than average amounts of technical experience with Windows machines. A pre-built, pre-configured machine should be easy for most people to use.
I've been meaning to find some kind of back-up solution for my main system, and researching it I heard good things about Windows Home Server. WHS is a version of Windows Server 2003 with a bunch of home-network focused software. I picked up a barebones system with two 200 GB Hard drives and a good-quality power supply for about $375 and a copy of WHS from the MS Company Store. You only need a keyboard, monitor, and mouse to do the setup and I used a USB stick to install the software (the system doesn't have a floppy disk or a CD/DVD drive).
All-in-all WHS fairly easy to setup, and the Home Server Connection software used to remotely administer it works well on my Windows Vista x64 main machine. I ran into two issues:
- Driver support is less than ideal. Windows Server drivers are touch and go to find, and many companies appear to punt support on it assuming they are never needed for consumer-grade hardware. For the NVIDIA motherboard and NETGEAR adapter I had to manually install Windows XP drivers, and the NETGEAR adapter still doesn't work for some mysterious reason. The motherboard LAN does, so that's good enough for now.
- Trying to configure the second drive is proving a pain. It failed to automatically create the second volume during setup for some reason, and it requires a strange mix of manual partitioning and then Home Server Connection configuration to add one.
So far WHS is really a nice solution for home system backup, media sharing, and file server. It's easy to administer and configure. Setting one up from scratch, however, requires more than average amounts of technical experience with Windows machines. A pre-built, pre-configured machine should be easy for most people to use.
