MS Home Server Knowledgebase

Boy, they say in the blog announcing the CTP that hints were dropped, but it seemed to me that the WHS Team folks had been doing a great job insinuating we wouldn’t be getting another build of WHS.

This is a lovely surprise to me. I really thought that all that was going to be released publicly was Beta 2, and so I was beginning the wait until ~Fall.

After reading that less than 60% of the first batch of invited beta participants had actually (presumably) installed the software, I was worried MS would feel many of the invitees would not be active enough (I certainly haven’t had the time to as much as I’d like). A lot of people have written about how (apparently) many of the Vista testers were not very helpful, just taking builds, and not providing feedback.

I am grateful that the WHS team has found the community’s feedback helpful, and the changes in this new release sound like they’re just increasing the WOW factor of this product.

It’s a great thing when something so simple can be so amazing.

I look forward to blogging soon about the new 7-step guided setup, and other new features in the CTP.

I put to Microsoft and the WHS Team –
Will there be any certification or approval process for Add-ins?
Is “Server Playground” going to be a community space for completed Add-Ins, or will there be any provided ‘central’ repository/list of ‘approved’ Add-ins?

This is all very exciting. Thanks a million to the whole Home Server team.

(Now tell us where you put the easter eggs
.oO(Maybe if I hold down the Q key long enough, John de Lancie will appear)

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Just a heads-up for future WHS beta installers — don’t remove the install DVD until you are totally complete with the install. I know I’m used to removing discs around the time of a reboot, but if you do, Setup will fail.

I got an error when WinFX was attempting to install — the error I got was;
installing WinFx failed, drive not ready, error code 0×80070015

This sounds really severe — I checked all kinds of things before realizing that it was incredibly simple — put the disc back in the drive, and reboot.

So, please, you WHS beta-testers out there, leave the disc in the drive.

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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.

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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?

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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!
(Continue reading…)

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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

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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!

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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.

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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.

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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.

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