Well, now I’ve got my trusty Windows home server working, I can tell you how it runs. And it runs pretty good, let me tell you.
This is the second full day that thats its been installed and it has thus taken two backups already of each computer ( A 30 and a 40 gig). The backups take up only 30 gigs at the moment. And I don’t expect it to rise very fast either as duplicate files (eg windows install files) are only copied once.
The server has all my downloads, photos and music on it as well, leaving only essential stuff on the PC’s. The printer is installed as well and works fine.
Well, nearly works fine. The All-in-One bit is not working. I can’t scan from any other PC. Now this would be relitively simple to remedy by adding USB Port Sharing to the Home Connector software that needs to be installed on client PC’s ( this, in fact, has all sorts of ramifications for USB devices – how about shared ReadyBoost Drives in Vista?). I’ve submitted a suggstion on this and voted on every similar suggestion relating to getting All-in-One printers to work.
The Home Connector software is really, really well put together. Without having to drag your screen, keyboard and mouse over to the server, you can control nearly everything about it. With emphasis on nearly. Control freaks will be left with somthing to be desired. Till yesterday the Connector and the Console were out of sync with the Connector telling me my network health was affected and the console telling me it was fine. But that seems to have gone now.
Even though the server is next door in the office and shares a wall with my room, I can still hear the fan whirring in the dead of night. Blasted thing – serves me right for buying a Dell server 🙂 . So, to allow me to sleep and safe gurad my sanity, I’ve set it to take back up during the day when I know that the server and the other PC’s will be on. By default its set to take back-ups between 12am and 6 am and changing this upsets the server a bit, its still works fine. Just make sure that the pc’s in question are fully switched on before the back windows opens. I switched my laptop on a bit to late this morning and a backup started the moment the Connector started talking with the server, slowing the startup process greatly.
I was browsing the fourms last night and discovered that people are building multi -terabyte Home Servers. The current record as last check was 2.06 Tb. Whoever that was must really have serious storage requirements a la Google. Or the National Security Agency. At 220Gb, my home server is running smoothly. I still ahve 160 Gb’s left. Unless I get really pushed for space I’m not buying any more hard drives. I’ve turned off the folder duplication freature for the moment while I figure out what to do about it.
Now, WHS is based primarily on Windows Server 2003 meaning that any application designed to run on Windoes Server has the potential to run on WHS. So. I’m taking my chances and ahve install Windows Virtual Server. And I’m in the middle of mounting Exchange 2007 (Beta 2, I think) as a Virtual Hard Drive. It will be very interesting to see if it works. The idea of WHS is to keep stuff you use on multimple PC’s in the one place (which is why you can access your personel folder from any other PC where you are logged in with the same Username and Password), so why not extend that to email? More than once I’ve got into the bind of needing my Desktop PC emails while I’m working on the Laptop, or vice versa. Since its running in a Virtual Machine, I doubt it’ll harm WHS’s processes. If this works, it follows to ask what else we can get away with running on Virtual Server? Buy one server, get one or two free – why not?
Already, after a few short days of use I can see the appeal to WHS to people. We live increasingly busy lives and have less time to deal with things like backups. WHS automates the whole process. With Norton Ghost I had to keep fiddling around with it to get it to do what I wanted it to do. WHS just works. Oh and Ghost insisted on moving 10 Gig files around my network for each backup – WHS doesn’t.
I can already see my self buying a release copy of WHS.
Random Musings 