Microsoft bought the "HomeServer.Com" domain a year or so ago.  The transaction that involved 3 companies, 4 foreign languages and 3 currencies.  It took awhile to complete, and it is a funny story that I like to tell in person.  But that is not what this post is about ...

When we enabled the Dynamic DNS services for Windows Home Server in the CTP build, we used to 2 test domains (livenode.com and livenode2.com) where Windows Home Server beta testers could get a personalized domain name (e.g. SmithFamily.livenode.com) for remote access to their home server while away from home.  

I have some great news to share with all of our early beta testers.  If you registered a personalized domain name with either livenode.com or livenode2.com prior to this weekend (August 3, 2007), that domain name will get transferred over to HomeServer.com when you install the RTM (Release to Manufacturing) version of Windows Home Server.  This was a one time transfer as a "THANKS" to all of our early testers. 

We worked hard to make this happen.  We know how important it can be to get your desired personalized domain name.  We never could promise this, until we were 100% sure it would work.  It works !! I just installed the RTM copy of the Windows Home Server software (one advantage to working on the team) and my domain name automatically showed up as ______.homeserver.com after I logged in with my Windows Live ID.

Any future domain names registered with either the Release Candidate (RC) build or the Windows Home Server 120-day Evaluation edition will be registered as livenode.com domains and will not be transferred over to HomeServer.com.  All new domain names registered with the RTM version of Windows Home Server will be using HomeServer.com starting today.

Thanks again to all of the early beta testers!!!  Your feedback through the Connect site, Community Forums and Newsgroup throughout the testing of Windows Home Server has been fantastic.

t.

• http://blog.homeserver.com - redirects to this blog
• http://forums.homeserver.com - redirects to the community forums
• http://www.homeserver.com - redirects to the Windows Home Server product information on Microsoft.com 

There were a number of press stories and blog posts on Friday and this a.m. about Windows Home Server "availability" on Aug 27, based on a MSFT tech support site indicating that date.  The story seems to be straightening itself out, but to clarify... the date refers to when tech support goes live for system builders. 

It is great to see that the system builder version has indeed made its way through the distribution channel in some markets. As most know, we released Home Server to manufacturing last month, handing if off to OEMs for their retail products and making the system builder version available to distributors worldwide.  Distributors selling the system builder version determine their own schedules and pricing, of course.  OEM products are still forthcoming.

J

Shhhh. Don't tell anybody but my work laptop is a Macbook Pro. You see we bought a few of them for our test lab to ensure that Macs work great with Windows Home Server's centralized storage (they do).

Once testing was done these pretty laptops were just sitting in the lab unused. I had heard that Apple had released something called "Boot Camp" that would let you run Windows Vista on a Macbook Pro. I figure it was worth giving it a try...

Turns out the Macbook Pro makes a pretty good Vista laptop. Apple's Windows Vista drivers appear solid and it's basically just a well engineered x86 laptop. Mine looks really nice with a big "Windows Home Server" sticker on the cover :-).  I've been using it pretty steadily for a few months, however, when I first set it up I didn't expect to use it long (I was just playing around) so I used the default partition size suggested by Boot Camp for my Vista partition (30GB I believe).

After a month or so of use, I found this was not big enough. I was down to just 1-2GB free. How to shrink the Mac partition and grow the Vista partition...?

Windows Home Server to the rescue. See, Windows Home Server's computer restore capability can restore to a larger hard drive (or partition) than the original. So here's what I did:

1. This morning I did a "Backup Now" on the Mac to make sure I had everything backed up to my Windows Home Server at work (I have a mini-home network in my office). Took about 4 minutes.
2. I rebooted the Mac into the Mac OS.  I floundered around (I find many Macisms counter-intuitive...just the way I'm wired I guess) and found how to delete the Vista disk partition.
3. I re-ran the Boot Camp tool. It lets you specify how big you want the two partitions. I told it to make my Windows partition 70GB (30 for Mac OS).
4. I inserted my Windows Home Server Computer Restore CD and rebooted, holding down the Alt (command key in Apple terms).  This let me choose to boot the PC...er...Mac from the CD.
5. When the Restore CD booted I told it which backup to use (the manual backup I had done 20 minutes earlier was the default so I didn't really need to do anything but press "Next"). I then confirmed that I wanted to restore the "30.3GB C: backup" to the "70GB C: drive".
6. About 30 minutes later the machine rebooted and I was back in Vista with a 70GB C: drive and 30GB+ of free space.

I did this same routine a few months ago at home when I upgraded my desktop machine with a larger hard disk, so it's useful for that scenario too.

Moral of the story? Windows Home Server Computer Restore is a great tool for dealing with ever changing hard disk sizes. Oh, and the Mac is a pretty nice Windows Vista PC.

-cek

P.S. Remember, you can find a copy of Windows Home Server Reviewer's Guide here. It provides a great overview of what the product does and how it works.