As reported on the Windows Home Server Blog another 10,000 invites went out to those picked to help test this fantastic product 
Its exciting to see more momentum behind this product and I think it has an excellent place in Microsofts lineup.
So, I’ve been running Windows Home Server beta 2 for about a week now, and it feels like I’ve been using it forever. It’s just so easy.
But something popped up in the Console today, and I’m not sure how it got there, or how to make it go away.
The screen is a detail of my primary Shared Folders’ space usage over the last week, with a little slider which will be useful in the future.
I can click on any of my Shared Folders, and receive a graph for just that Folder’s usage.
It’s a useful feature, and I like it. But I can’t resize it, and I can’t figure out why it’s suddenly there now (other than it now has one week of data), and, I wonder if I can option it away.
Have any other testers out there noticed this screen yet, or can perhaps shed some light on this?
One of the most appealing features from Home Server is having centralized storage space for all the PC’s on your network. To work seamlessly you will need to make sure that the user accounts on Home Server matches those on you PC. This will keep you from having to login each time you go to use the shared folders.
If you dont have the users matched and you go to login this is what you will see:
Now if you want to avoid having to do this here is what you do!
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Saw the post on the Home Server Blog linking to me this morning and was very pleased. I have been avidly reading the forums and there is a wealth of information there that makes some of the articles here pale in comparison. I am going to be moving forward and posting more. I am interested in having others share their experiences with home server. If you are interested in contributing to this site let me know by emailing me at dave@(remove this)mshomeserver.org
Home Server Blog has announced the opening of forums specifically for users of he Home Server Beta. You can find the forums at Server Playground. They also announced that they would be sending out another round of beta invitations in the near future! See you on the forums!
The older PC I had used for the install had a pretty small hard drive in it, so I ran out and got a external USB hard drive to increase space on the server. It was a snap to upgrade and everything went very smooth. Here is a brief walk through of how easy it was.
Here you can see that I had barely 4G left of space but with the external drive attached that soon is going to be fixed:
You can see the external drive is not initialized at this time so I went ahead and right clicked on it:
Click on Add and you get the Add A Hard Drive Wizard:
Clicking on Next will bring a warning that the hard drive will be formatted when it is added:
I was ok with formatting so I hit Finish to get started and when it finished I got a results screen:
Click on Done and you can see the status of my new hard drive added to the server.
I was pleased to find that expanding the drive space was very easy. I kind of wish it didn’t force you to format the drive. The drive I got was fresh from Best Buy so it wasn’t really a problem, but I could see if you wanted to add a partially filled drive it could be problematic without having to do some housecleaning.
Finally got Home Server up and running in my real network with no fuss and no muss. While the install procedure is rather lengthy it was easy and mostly hands off. I was going to go out and buy a new machine to test the beta but in when I was reading the beta documentation one of the points were that it was hoped that Home Server would be able to run on a older PC. The PC I pieced together was barely over spec but it still worked easily. I will have to add some additional external storage soon though as I only had smaller hard drives available.
I installed the connector software on my Windows Vista laptop. Once installed I was able to connect remotely to the Home Server:
Once logged in you can see the status console:
On this first screen you can see all the computers that are associated with the the server. In this case I only have the one PC at this time associated. The next area is User Accounts:
The next area on the console is the Shared Folders which lists all the shares you have access to:
We then come to the Server Storage console:
Since my firewall is off on this laptop the Network Status shows a critical error:
I will go into more detail on each of these sections in future posts.
I was able to get my virtual Vista Ultimate machine to connect to the Home Server so it is very doable for testing. I had to run it on its own virtual network so they would see each other correctly, but that may just be my lack of VMware experience. I am also getting a “Network Health: Critical” warning but I am sure that is because even with 2GB my laptop is just screaming under running 3 OS’s at once.
I did get another box to run on my real home network so that is what I am going to work on next setting up, but it is nice to know that I can fall back to this test bed if I want to try something out without risking my real machines.
I was able to successfully get Home Server up and running on VMware using the beta version of Vmware Workstation exp build 36983. You can download it at the VMware Beta Center.
I mounted the ISO file directly to the machine and set the HD at 80G, all other items were at default. I am running this on a Dell Inspiron laptop with Duo Centrino and 2Gb RAM.
Here you can see the settings from the VMware console:
And after starting you can see that it booted right into it:
Next I will run Connector on a Vista Ultimate Virtual machine and see if it can connect on a virtual network.
I am going to run out later today and get a dedicated box for the Beta but I think I will run a test on VMware to see if I can use a virtual home server. Since it uses underlying Windows 2003 systems I am thinking it should be ok, but I will find out soon enough. This will also allow me to easily get screen shots of the install procedure.