Windows Home Server

 More than a year ago if I recall correctly, I signed up for the 120-day trial of Microsoft's new 'Windows Home Server'. At that time the deal was, you give them $7.95 for shipping and they send you a couple DVDs with the goods. Anyway, after going through the order process, giving my credit card number, and getting excited - they canceled it a couple days later with no explaination. Well, recently I signed up again and this time they sent me the goods ... for free. That's the new deal. I think the first time I ordered it they were still grappling with whether or not to allow individuals (non-OEMs) to purchase the software to install on whatever. Around that time they were pitching the MediaSmart Server from Hewlett Packard which was specially designed for the job. From what I've subsequently read thats a really nice little machine. There was some talk that you needed certain hardware to do the job well and that they weren't sure hobbyists or whatever could put something together that would cut the mustard. Glad they got over that! 

So when I got the software in the mail, I applied a tower that I had sitting around - and some drives I was repurposing from my NetGear SC100 (little toaster looking network attached storage (NAS) device that was literally toasting my drives). The tower is probably overkill for the job but it was the only suitable machine I had free. It's a 3GHz P4 Extreme with Hyperthreading. Yeah, overkill... Anyway, the install was relatively painless except for the cheap RAID (ITE8212) card that I unfortunately left in the machine for the first install attempt. I got a corrupted install the first time but, realizing that the card might have put the kibosh on the install, I removed it and tried again sucessfully. From there you just add drives, nothing fancy or complicated - the server just picks them up and adds them to your 'storage pool'. It allows you to specify what stuff needs to be duplicated for safety in the case of a drive failure - then it just handles it for you. You can see my setup below:

Once you've got your drives in there and the machine is stablized, you can install the 'Home Server Connector' software on up to ten machines (XP, VISTA) in your household and then the server will work with your machines to make sure they are backed up. This part is seamless. Another great feature of this software is that it implements the 'Media Connect' protocol which means it was picked up my my D-LINK Medialounge and the XBOX in the house. Once you put your home videos and picture collection on the server it will make them available in the living room via a remote control or XBOX controller.

The server also allows you to remotely access the files on your machine, and remote desktop into the machine(s) themselves from anywhere in the world via some nifty magic (port forwarding and DNS tricks). You get a name like <myservername>.homeserver.com that you, or family members, can easily from any web browser. So cool.

I'm sure I'll have some more posts on this stellar product shortly (I haven't even touched on the addins or the developer API). Further, I'm sure that with PDC rapidly approaching we'll see some very cool new things, maybe some cloud services integration with Live Mesh or something. (You can currently do offsite backup for things like your photo collection or whatever, but its pretty expensive.) Here's a link to a Channel9 video about this:

http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/Rory/Windows-Home-Server/

and Microsoft's official site on it:

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/windowshomeserver/default.mspx

Nice show WHS team, keep it coming.

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