Windows Home Server

[tek-monkey]

Anyone use it? If so, any comments?

My server is annoying, its full of small HDs and this means my stuff is spread across multiple drives. Not a problem, but it means I have to look in 2 movies folders for example to find what I want - not good! Yes, I'm lazy. Looking at WHS, seems to make a pool of drives out of all of yours. Seems good, but no different to JBOD really. However, this seems to have more fault tolerence. If a drive dies, it seems you just lose that drives data - no files span drives. If so, this is ideal. Also I want access to all my stuffs wherever I am, so I can DL the new Dexter at home, and watch it at the GFs.

All in all, WHS seems good for all this. Unless anyone here thinks differently?

 

[db]

Anyone use it? If so, any comments?

My server is annoying, its full of small HDs and this means my stuff is spread across multiple drives. Not a problem, but it means I have to look in 2 movies folders for example to find what I want - not good! Yes, I'm lazy. Looking at WHS, seems to make a pool of drives out of all of yours. Seems good, but no different to JBOD really. However, this seems to have more fault tolerence. If a drive dies, it seems you just lose that drives data - no files span drives. If so, this is ideal. Also I want access to all my stuffs wherever I am, so I can DL the new Dexter at home, and watch it at the GFs.

i haven't looked into WHS in any detail, but surely your last point would be limited by your upload speed? i know you can access your stuff from anywhere by dialling into your WHS remotely, but you can hardly stream stuff from it with a 512k upstream!

or am i missing some clever technology that will allow this?

 

[tek-monkey]

Dunno if Darshiva still reads this, but AFAIK he has a box in Stafford on Virgin BB, and streams to his PC in Germany. Check out orb for an example, which incidentally installs to WHS.

 

[tek-monkey]

Well the server is up, but not really had a chance to do much yet. However, I do have uTorrent webui running, thats damn fine. Can now monitor/control my downloads from anywhere

 

[db]

Well the server is up, but not really had a chance to do much yet. However, I do have uTorrent webui running, thats damn fine. Can now monitor/control my downloads from anywhere

you should just logmein.. then it's just as if you're sat in front of your computer and you can do whatever you like!

i'm always bobbing onto my home machine to whizz up a quick photoshop, or check µtorrent, or whatever

but yeah, let us know how WHS goes.. i'm interested in it me sen.. do you set it up like a normal server, as a domain controller etc? or is it a more simplified structure than that?

 

[tek-monkey]

I use logmein too, but this is a web front end for utorrent I can just access as a bookmark. Is a lot quicker than logging in, lol.

Setup of WHS is a doddle, start it off and go the pub. Come back and its done. I'm still wary of the shared storage, so have kept most of my drives seperate for now, but I do have about 600Gb of shared space to mess about with. Only issue I've had so far is that the connector software is 32 bit only, I use 64 bit Vista as I have 4Gb of RAM.

Its all based on server 2008 from what I can see, just need to sort out a vpn now and make it stream.

 

[tek-monkey]

Just looking at hamachi, this seems to do exactly what I need

 

[Sofa]

AFAIK he has a box in Stafford on Virgin BB, and streams to his PC in Germany.

Not any more.

 

[tek-monkey]

FINALLY got around to rebuilding my WHS tonight, and it now streams properly. Upload speed is a bit pants, only getting 350k, but its still better than youtube! Could mean my brother is downloading, dunno as I'm not at home. Means I have full streaming access to all my media, wherever I am. Once I move it all onto the thing anyway.

 

[shoes]

Fair enough, I am considering installing server 2003 on a machine i have lying about at home. whats home server like, what are the restrictions? I presume it doesn't ship with exchange / IIS / and won't act as a dhcp server?

I finally managed to install sbs2003 on my home machine after much ballache with my RAID setup, however its a bit excessive for my needs.

Can ISA run on WHS?

Also does WMS act as a media server which is compatible with Media Centre?

 

[tek-monkey]

Natively it doesn't do most of that, but add-ins enable DHCP and IIS. Well, kind of IIS, not read up on it enough yet. Its actually server 2003 but cut back a bit, with an extra interface over the top. Very much doubt you'd get exchange on it, still looking to see if SQL server will run properly.

As for media centre, it does indeed. Makes the entire archive available to the XBOX apparently, not tried it yet though. Sending you a PM.