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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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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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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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!

First Login to your Home Server Console:

In Home Server Console click on the User Accounts tab:

Click +Add to start the Add User Wizard:

Fill out the Name of the user, then the Logon Name and finally check if you want the user to have Remote Access. Click Next:
NOTE: As mentioned earlier make sure the Logon Name is the same as the one on your PC

You will now set a password for the user account. As with the Logon Name make sure that it matches the one you used on the PC. Input the password and confirm it the second time then click Next:

Setting permissions for your shared folders will allow you to limit access to folders by user account. The options are as follows:

Read/Write Users can access the folders contents, modify them, and create new items. This includes deletion so be careful if you give access to sensitive documents.

Read Users can only read the folders content and are unable to modify them or create new items.

No Access As simple as it sounds. If you do not give the user access to the folder they cannot read, modify, or create items.

Set the permissions you want and click Finish:

Home Server will then create the user account and set permissions. It also creates a personal directory for the user that only they will have access to. To exit the wizard click Done

You will now see the new user account you created in the Home Server console under the User Accounts tab

Nice and easy!

This next part is for the more technical people in the house and has no bearing on setting the user accounts up. From the way this looks it is using a pass through authentication we all came to know and love back with non domain NT servers. An additional feature I would like to see would be some kind of utility to keep your Logon Names synced across all your PCs. Without using the server for centralized accounts perhaps a Administrator account on each machine for Home Server to make password changes.

UPDATE
It looks like I spoke to soon about keeping the passwords synced. It has been included! When I created that account by mistake I did it with a different password then my local PC. I soon got the yellow house alert and when I clicked on it I got the following window:

In my case I want to keep my local password and change the one on the server. So I choose the option Keep my password on this computer which then asks me to confirm my password locally AND put the password that is set for Home Server since it is different. Here is the success message:

After syncing the passwords I am back to my little green house of happiness!

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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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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 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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