David Strome's Blog : Windows Home Server

Power Pack 1 available for Windows Home Server

dstrome — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 20:52:00 GMT

The Windows Home Server team released Power Pack 1 today. It's been a long road for the Home Server team and I have to imagine, a pretty big learning experience. We always want to release the best software we can but being part of the beta audience for Home Server within the company, I could see the true commitment and devotion to making this the best release possible. That team deserves a huge congratulations for a job really well done. And now we get to enjoy the results :)

If you want to install Power Pack 1 right away (and why wouldn't you?), head over to the Microsoft Download Center and grab yourself a copy. Follow the instructions to install it. If you want to wait (but you don't want to, do you?), PP1 will be installed on your server via Windows Update in August. Either way, once you install it you'll have all of benefit from all this stuff:

Windows Vista 64bit support
Shared folder backup to hard disks (more below on this one)
Connector software auto-update (really helpful if you have more than a couple clients)
Segment Remote Access users (allow some to access computers only, some to access shared folders only, both, etc)
Drag and drop file uploads and download multiple files more easily in Remote Access
Improved power management
A fix for the data corruption problem
Lots of other improvements

I've been running PP1 for quite a while and it's been rock-solid on my server. Aside from the 64bit support I've used all of the features listed above and they've made life a lot more simple. I actually used Home Server to transfer data more securely to and from my tax guy this year - it was simple enough for him to log in, see only the things he should see, get the data and transfer. Nice!

Something I've wanted since Home Server was released was a local backup. I've been using Jungle Disk to back up my shared folder data to the Amazon S3 service, which is nice, but I only really want to use that in the event of a catastrophic failure. It'd be much simpler (and faster) to be able to restore from a local copy of the data. Power Pack 1 lets you install a hard disk (external disks are better in my opinion) and indicate that it's a back up drive. You can then select the shared folders you want to back up and back them up to the drive. If you use an external drive, you can then dismount and remove the drive and store it in a safe place. I know some people at work use multiple backup disks and keep a disk 'offsite' (usually by taking a disk to work). This way they always have a safe copy of the data, including a copy not in the same location. Right now I just have a single 250GB external disk that I back up to regularly and use the Jungle Disk backups as an insurance policy if the house burns down. I didn't get this kind of data redundancy even at my last job. After all, family pictures are more important than budget files, right? :)

Head on over to the Windows Home Server blog for the official announcement and be sure to get a copy of Power Pack 1.

JungleDisk, Amazon S3 and Windows Home Server

dstrome — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 09:06:37 GMT

A couple posts ago I talked about my personal (disclaimer) Windows Home Server. I store some of my data on the server and am gradually moving stuff over to it from my PCs. As excellent as the home server is, it currently doesn't allow you to perform backups of data stored on the server (this will change soon though). It does have drive redundancy if one or more drives fail. However if the server hardware somehow fails, some kind of disaster wipes all the data, or my house burns down, it’s a single point of failure. Out of the box, there’s currently no functionality to back up data stored *on* the server.

Enter JungleDisk and Amazon S3. JungleDisk, which is currently in beta, is a fairly nifty little WHS add-in that manages backing up data stored on the WHS machine and pushes it up to S3 in ‘the cloud’ (aka the Internet). Every day, JungleDisk goes through my data and backs up any changed data to S3 (and only changed data - it’s intelligent enough not to transfer data twice). That data remains at S3 for an admin-configurable amount of time - right now I have it set to 60 days. You can configure which shares to backup, when the backup should run and end, and whether you want to use individual file encryption.

If I need to restore data, I simply open up the JungleDisk add-in, open the restore window, select the date from which I want to restore and select the files and/or directories to restore. If you have the PC version of JungleDisk you can also access your S3 bucket from any computer that JungleDisk is installed on (provided you have the keys to the bucket and the file encryption key if used). Very handy if you find that you can't access your home server because of network connectivity to your house but need "that" file for a presentation. This makes me feel a LOT better knowing that the data on the server is now being backed up and that I always have access to my files. I feel my data is fairly secure given that it’s protected by S3’s security and also individual file encryption.

I currently back up about 1.86GB of data with JungleDisk which translated to a whopping 43 cents charged to my credit card for December :) Not too shabby.

Just goes to show how easy it is to add really valuable functionality to WHS. For more information, go visit JungleDisk.

David

Me and my Stay at Home Server

dstrome — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 05:40:50 GMT

Hello. My name's David, and I have a stay at home server. It backs up my computers. It centralizes my data. It even lets me access my files and computers on my network from the Internet. I'm proud of my stay at home server. What is my stay at home server exactly? Some massive machine with quad Xeon procs and 32GB of ram and DAS with 40 drives in RAID10 and a $40k price tag? Nope. It's Windows Home Server.

Windows Home Server is a new product from Microsoft that enables regular people (not IT people) who happen to have multiple computers on their networks to manage those computers. It's a full-fledged server, actually running on Windows Server 2003. I've been running Windows Home Server (WHS) at home for a few months now as a beta tester. A month ago, I switched over to the RTM version and set up a proper 'server' machine to run it on.

I decided to set up my own server rather than buy a new machine. I was really tempted to go with a HP MediaSmart Server. They're an excellent form factor, they're quiet, they have fairly good expandability and they just look so cool, but I did have a machine laying around that I wasn't using. I'm running my server on an oldish Dell Dimension 8200 (2.8GHz, 1GB ram, headless, no keyboard/mouse) with three Seagate Barracuda 500GB drives. Gives me just under 1.4TB of drive space. Connected to my wired machines over gigabit Ethernet and various other laptops and devices via wireless. The interesting thing about WHS is its storage management. It does a bunch of funky logic to create redundant copies of the files on the server so that, if you so choose, no shares and files within them are ever on a single drive. It's not RAID, it's easier. Adding a drive is as easy as physically adding the drive, telling WHS it can use it, and that's it. WHS takes care of adding the drive to the pool, formatting it, and balancing the data on the server accordingly. Very slick.

Backups and Single Instance Storage

The biggest thing for me at the moment is being able to keep current and reliable backups of all of my client machines. When you set up WHS, you install connector software on each client computer. WHS automatically configures and schedules backups for each computer and stores the backup on the server. It allows me to go back at any time and retrieve either single files, or using a restore CD, restore the entire machine as of the last backup. Backup storage is quite intelligent. It uses Single Instance Storage to keep backups from ballooning out of control. Once a file is backed up and stored, it isn't stored again. So, if two computers have the same file, the file is stored once, and a pointer is created for the second computer's backup. Same for all subsequent backups of all machines. This means that even after a month and after backing up several machines, my total backup space used is about 190GB. It started around 180GB (I take lots of pictures).

File Management

File management is incredible easy too - WHS ships with default shares - Music, Photos, Videos, Public and Software. Music, Photos and Videos can be used to share media with Windows Extenders such as the Xbox 360. Very nifty if you want to consolidate all of your media files from being scattered all over your network into one place - no more having to flip through different computers on your Xbox just to listen to that one album that's on your wife's machine :). In addition to the default folders, for every user, a private share is created. Users can easily store files in the shares and those files can be access from any computer (on which that user is logged on) or the Internet. Nice. All of the folders have the option of being duplicated across your physical drives so that in case one drive fails, the files are not lost.

Administration

User management is simple - Add a user, share is created, you can select which other shares the user has access to (simple radio button clicks), enable remote access, etc. WHS takes care of making sure that the local user accounts work with the user accounts on the server. cool.

Server management is done via the Windows Home Server Console. It's an incredibly easy administrator interface that simplifies administration and makes it understandable to the non-techy.

It's actually an RDP session on the server. You can connect either by clicking the console system tray icon or by connecting remote from the WHS web site. The interface design guides you to where you need to be to perform given tasks and takes care of all the background junk for you. nifty.

Addins

WHS is a pretty solid solution on its own, but there are always things that people want, that we don't provide out of the box. Therefore WHS enables people to develop addins. Addins enable people to expand their server's functionality in any number of ways - so far, people have added picture galleries, home automation and offsite backups in the cloud. The list is growing rapidly. It'll be extremely cool to watch this space over the next couple years.

As you can see from the screen shot above, I've added the JungleDisk addin to WHS. This addin enables me to back up data on my server to a service in the cloud to protect against a catastrophic loss of the server (fire, flood, theft, etc). I have a post about that I'll put up soon. It's quite a nifty service.

I really do feel that WHS is an excellent product - it's powerful yet simple and elegant. It does exactly what it's supposed to do - bring together the information islands on your network. I wouldn't trust my home data to it and subject my wife to it if I didn't feel it was something that would make our lives better. If you have several computers on your network, I strongly suggest you take a look at WHS. Go here for more information: Stay at Home Server.

Here are some great videos that the WHS team has put out. They're hilarious.

Video: Introduction- "Stay-At-Home" Servers

Video: Home Sweet Server

Video: Dueling Experts