Windows Home Server: I Owe You One
You may remember a while back when I described my initial encounter with our newest Server product: Windows Home Server. Back then I was amongst the many hundred Microsoft people beta testing the product to make sure that our customers would get a solid product.
As I'm sure you realize, products are usually beta for a very good reason. And Windows Home Server (WHS) was no different. Although I never lost a single file during the beta process, I did have a couple of interesting challenges to deal with. One was the nasty bug, that placed a back up file in the wrong directory, which would send WHS in to a tizzy, completely halting the nightly backup, until this file was deleted.
This experience made me check the server console every night to make sure that nothing had gone wrong, and my heart would skip a beat (and I'd get one more gray hair) every time the WHS taskbar icon turned orange or (god forbid) red!
But, once I had removed the offending file, WHS would start it's back up of your 4 PC's again as if nothing had every been wrong. I liked the comfort this gave me. I also like the fact that I could access the server from outside my home through my firewall to check that nothing was wrong or to fix the occasional issue.
But by and large, I had few issues. In fact the only real big one was when time came to upgrade my home server from Beta 1 to the final released (RTM) version. Because of the funky RAID controllers I had and the fact that I had more that 12 hard drives, I couldn't upgrade the server, I had to re-install the server. Normally that is not an issue, but WHS formats the data drives when adding them to the drive array. For most this wouldn't be an issued and had I just used the server for backup, I wouldn't have issues with this either, but the fact of the matter was that I had about 2.4TB's worth of movies, music and photos. so I had to copy all that off the server, until I could upgrade.
All this is water under the bridge, it's all done now and I have our home server humming in our garage. One of the smartest things the WHS team did was to provide a programming model for WHS. this means that you can find WHS add-in's in healthy supply. My favorite on is Whiist. this sets up an automatic picture gallery server, without forcing me to do ANY HTML, VBS or javascript programming. I just set up the server in the console add-in (that plugs into WHS's console), point it to a folder on the server, copy a small application into the folder and Hey Presto, Photo gallery!
I have given my family back home access to the page (that WHS provides access to through my firewall). All I have do is to copy new pictures up to the designated folder and they can now browse the newest pictures of my family. Actually, I have a batch (robocopy) job that copies new pictures from a certain folder from my PC to our Media Center PC in our living room as well to the server, so as I make these pictures available to my immediate family, they automatically become accessible to my entire family as well as our friends.
this is way better than the tedious process of uploading pictures to MSN or Live etc.
And did I tell you about the backup? well, this is an area where WHS excels! Every night it backs up every PC in our house. Until a couple of days ago, I haven't had the opportunity to to try out it's restore capabilities. Of course, there's had been a couple of times where I had to restore individual files (like when I couldn't find the map for our PocketPC GPS system) and it's been a breeze to find these files.
But to the story I really wanted to share. I had long wanted to replace a systems drive on our Media Center PC. It's main drive was driving me nuts. It had this very distinct whine that I could hear across the room (and more importantly, my wife could too). I had already gotten a quieter drive, but the idea of re-installing the PC (Vista Ultimate) didn't appeal to me.
Well, the other day, I finally pulled the trigger on this whole exercise.
Based on the feedback from various co-workers (who had used WHS to recover a PC after a fatal hard drive crash), I decided to simply replace the hard drive and restore the Media Center PC from my daily back-ups from the server. This was possibly the easiest re-install I have ever been through! In fact the only hick-up was the fact that the WHS recover CD didn't have a driver for my Ethernet. I had to download that on another PC, put it on a USB stick and WHS could then read the driver from the USB stick.
Once the initial setup was done, WHS could start restoring the backup. Than took about 45 min for the 40GB partition that I have set aside for the system. After that the PC re-booted and behaved as if it had always run on that hard drive. I've had no issues since! I have been told that there's a know problem with Internet Explorer (if you need to print web pages), that creates a temp folder that never gets backed up by WHS (and subsequently doesn't get resorted). Although this can easily be fixed, it does seem less than smart that IE depends on a temporary folder that it doesn't recreate if it's not there, but I digress.
My next project is to re-build the PC in our den and, based on my success using WHS to restore my Media Center PC, I am absolutely going to use the same process for the next one!
Windows Home Server: I definitely owe you one!
