So I finally got tired of hav­ing both my backup server and net­work share server down and decided to do some­thing about it. Unfor­tu­nately, rebuild­ing both of them is not cost-effective at the time since com­pletely rebuild­ing the Solaris Raid-Z server I used for back­ups and the Cen­tOS 5 server I used for net­work shares would involve siz­able expen­di­ture of both money and time (which as we all know equals money). So I ended up look­ing around for some­thing a lit­tle more bud­getable and ended up find­ing the Acer Aspire Easy­s­tore H340, which Newegg.com sells for $379.00. The H340 runs Win­dows Home Server, which I used sev­eral times set­ting up home media net­works for clients while I was in col­lege. It’s essen­tially a stripped down ver­sion of Win­dows Server 2003, with­out all the fun that is con­fig­ur­ing a Server 2003 instal­la­tion from scratch (which I’ve done more times than I want to think about). Microsoft released it a few years back in the hope they could get peo­ple to start using cen­tral loca­tions in their homes for back­ing up and stor­ing media to play on their var­i­ous com­put­ers and Xbox 360s. Of course, Linux did this ages ago and I’d been using Linux and Solaris servers to do back­ups and share media until their hard dri­ves crapped out on me over the past year.

Win­dows Home Server Console

(Run­down and more details after the break)

The Run­down…

Over­all, I give Win­dows Home Server a solid 9 out of 10.  Com­pa­ra­ble Linux dis­tros get 9/10 as well.  It should be noted that I have NEVER given an OS a per­fect 10 and prob­a­bly never will, there is always room for improvement.

Win­dows Home Server loses points for:

1. Being the spawn of an evil, power-hungry, money-grabbing, cor­po­rate ass­hole sys­tem. Yeah, its a good prod­uct, but I just don’t like Microsoft’s busi­ness strat­egy and ethics (or lack thereof). Yes, this is the rea­son that any Win­dows OS loses points for in my book.
2. Not hav­ing any form of noti­fi­ca­tion that the ini­tial auto­mated setup/update process might take over an hour. This scares peo­ple who have never done some­thing like this before. Heck, its only one line of text in the quick­start guide or even on the screen.
3. Minor issue with exit­ing from a Remote Desk­top ses­sion into the server. Some­times this causes the WHS to think that your antivirus on the server has stopped run­ning and imme­di­ately throws your net­work into Crit­i­cal Health.
4. Backup could use a lit­tle work. It would be nice to con­fig­ure seper­ate backup times for seper­ate com­put­ers instead of a sin­gle backup time for all com­put­ers. Case in point, it would be nice to have CASTER3 (my gam­ing rig), backup while I am at work dur­ing the day, and have FATE (XP Net­book) backup at night.

Win­dows Home Server GAINS points for:

1. Pre-installed on most new home servers. Saves time and makes it eas­ier for newbies.
2. Easy instal­la­tion on cus­tom instal­la­tions. I didn’t have to do this for my own home server, but the times I have done it in the past its gone very smoothly.
3. Ease of set­ting up remote (read — Inter­net, not LAN) access to the server. Microsoft did a very smart thing by pro­vid­ing this for free along with Win­dows Home Server via HomeServer.net. While get­ting the router (and pos­si­bly modem) con­fig­ured cor­rectly can be a bit of a chal­lenge for some (includ­ing myself — the first time I installed WHS for some­one they had a stan­dard router, which fed into their von­age router, which then fed into their cable modem router, and all 3 needed to be con­fig­ured cor­rectly and get­ting into the von­age router was a mas­sive pain), it is definetely worth it. Unfor­tu­nately, you can only have one HomeServer.net ID reg­is­tered per Win­dows Live Account (and I made the mis­take of using my Live Account for some­one else’s server), this can be got­ten around via use of DynDns.com and a cor­rectly con­fig­ured router.
4. Expand­abil­ity via addins. The core install of win­dows home server can’t do much aside from backup dri­ves and locally share out media. There are addins to enhance its media shar­ing abil­i­ties, inter­face with home automa­tion, pro­vide enhanced mon­i­tor­ing of the server and drive usage details, the list goes on. The P80 addon adds a great way to remotely mon­i­tor your home com­put­ers (win­dows machines at least) and net­work health and sta­tus remotely. The WebGuide plu­gin also is far supe­rior to the built-in media shar­ing over the inter­net as it allows for stream­ing of music and videos instead of hav­ing to down­load them. There’s even an addon for remotely man­ag­ing your Win­dows Home Server from your iPhone or iPod Touch (haven’t used it though, you’ve gotta spend money for the iPhone OS app).  A good source for addins is http://www.whsplus.com/.

The Review…

The Acer Easy­s­tore proved to be far more cost effec­tive than com­pa­ra­ble HP Home Servers, both in the short run and the long run. In the short run, there is the obvi­ous fact that it comes with a 1 ter­abyte hard drive pre­in­stalled. So basi­cally you are pay­ing around $280 for the hard­ware and the Win­dows Home Server license, which is a pretty good deal. Now, in the long run the Easy­s­tore saves money over the HP servers due to its low power usage. With the excep­tion of the HP Medi­aS­mart Server LX195 model, all of HP’s Home Servers run on either a Celeron or a basic new-model Pen­tium. The Acer and the Lx195 both run on the Intel Atom proces­sor, which was designed for net­books but is see­ing adop­tion in some desk­tops and servers due to its extremely low power con­sump­tion, with the Acer draw­ing 200 watts of power at most. For com­par­i­son, my gam­ing rig (detailed out in my pre­vi­ous post, Se7en Days of Win­dows Se7en) draws 650 watts at peak con­sump­tion, and thats actu­ally rather low for a mod­ern gam­ing rig. The other advan­tage that the Acer has over the LX195 is the hard drive. The Acer has the 1 ter­abyte drive men­tioned ear­lier, whereas the HP has only a 640 giga­byte drive. Con­sid­er­ing the two are the same cost on Newegg, the choice is clear.

The Easy­s­tore comes with Win­dows Home Server (referred to from here on as WHS) pre­in­stalled, as do all the HP mod­els, so all you have to do is plug the server into your net­work and power it up. Of course, the servers are all what we in the indus­try call ‘head­less.’ That is, they have no graph­ics cards installed on them. You either have to use remote con­nec­tions in, which is how WHS was designed to be used, or use a USB graph­ics con­nec­tion. All the times I had con­fig­ured WHS before were repur­pos­ings of older com­put­ers so I actu­ally had graph­ics on the machine I was work­ing with, so this was a change for me. The server comes with a CD that has the WHS Con­nec­tor Soft­ware on it, and you install this on a com­puter and use it to con­fig­ure your new server.

Con­fig­u­ra­tion itself does not take long, but the auto­mated server setup that takes place BEFORE you can con­fig­ure the server can take a while because it auto­mat­i­cally installs updates on the server. Once that is done, you go through a wiz­ard that sets things such as the admin­is­tra­tor pass­word for the server, the server name (I called mine NANOHA, in mem­ory of my cur­rently dead Cen­tOS 5 file server). At that point, your server is up and running.

The next steps con­sist of actu­ally set­ting up your server and com­put­ers to do what you actu­ally want them to do. The first thing I did was add a sec­ond hard drive to server. One of the nice things about the H340 is how easy it is to install a new hard drive. You flip open the front of the case, slide out one of the hot-swap bays, install the drive in the tray (no screws needed!), slide it back in, and latch it shut. Then you go into the Win­dows Home Server con­trol panel (via the soft­ware you installed to con­fig­ure the machine) and use the Server Stor­age panel to add the new drive. WHS starts using it right away, and seems to pre­fer added dri­ves over the one that has the oper­at­ing sys­tem on it for storage.

WHS Con­sole Stor­age Panel

Con­fig­ur­ing your computer(s) to backup to the server is just as easy. In the WHS Con­trol Panel, there is a sec­tion called Com­put­ers & Backup. Here you can see all com­put­ers on your net­work that have the WHS Con­nec­tor installed. Right click­ing one of them brings up a short menu that has the option of “Con­fig­ure Backup.”  The con­sole will then scan the com­puter and give you a list of all the dri­ves that can be backed up.  You choose the dri­ves you want backed up, and then if you want any cer­tain things to be excluded from the backup (like tem­po­rary fold­ers) and thats it.  In the options panel for the server, you can choose when the back­ups are run and how long they are stored for.  Restor­ing from a backup is some­thing I haven’t had to do yet, but whats nice about the back­ups is that you can access spe­cific files inside the drive backup (which I have done already) by choos­ing View Backup from the same menu that had Con­fig­ure Backup, and then you choose the backup you want to open.  From there, it acts just like brows­ing any other stor­age device.

The only major gripe I really have about Win­dows Home Server is not so much a gripe about it, its more of a gripe about how the Xbox 360 han­dles videos.  The codecs included on the 360 for play­ing video amount to approx­i­mately noth­ing.  Its some­thing like AVI, MPG4, and WMV.  No MKV sup­port, no DivX sup­port, and of course not XviD sup­port.  The way around this is stream­ing, which works fine for videos that either have the sub­ti­tles encoded into the video stream, have no sub­ti­tles, or have exter­nal sub­ti­tles.  Trans­la­tion: Most fan­subbed anime isn’t going to work here.  Not to men­tion there is barely any sup­port for stream­ing from WHS to an Xbox, and the Atom proces­sor imme­di­ately inval­i­dates live transcod­ing as it would utterly kill the server’s per­for­mance.  So, it looks like I’m stuck watch­ing anime on my com­puter for the time being until I can fig­ure out how to get MKV stream­ing to the 360 work­ing prop­erly or find some other solution.

If you have any ques­tions about Win­dows Home Server, leave a com­ment and I’ll try to answer as best I can.

Pos­si­bly Related Posts

• No Related Posts

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 11th, 2009 at 12:59 and is filed under Technobabble. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.