Adventures With Windows Home Server

Before you start reading, let me go ahead and tell you that this article is computer related but not specifically gaming related. You’re now free to ignore this is you would like to do so. If you have a lot of things you value on machines on your home network but don’t have a backup, sharing, or disaster recovery plan for your home PC’s then you might want to go ahead and read this and think about implementing it.

For those of you that are computer competent but not computer savvy, let me get on my soap box for a second. If you haven’t had a hard drive fail, you will. Also, remember that there are two kinds of people when it comes to backing up; those who have religion and those who are about to get religion. Forensic data recovery? Definitely an option. One that starts at about $1500 for a damaged hard drive. You might find it easier, less expensive, and more calming to your soul to have plans like these in place. I’ve been sweating this at my house for a little while so I decided to take action.

This past weekend, I re-purposed an older computer (Pentium 4 processor, about a gig of RAM, and some largish hard drives) as a new server for the house. To facilitate this, I decided to use the new Microsoft Home Server OS. This OS is based on Windows Server 2003 so it has a pretty well-tested and well-used core to it.

The reason I decided to do this is simple. We have three machines that we pretty much use every day plus a TiVo, Wii, and XBox 360. Tarkheena and I both have gaming rigs that we play on plus I have a utilitarian machine that also has Photoshop and Office along with a larger second hard drive where I was storing photos, videos, and our digitized music collection. About a year ago, Tark and I sat down with three desktops and our two notebooks at the time and ripped all of the CD’s we own into a directory on that machine. I then duplicated that on another machine for backup. So a few thousand songs, a few thousand photos, screenshots from games that we have played (not including hundreds of EQ screenshots that were on a HDD that failed without backup) and a bunch of other stuff like backups of my Vanguard site and the like are all sitting on these computers in shared folders and duplicated for the most part onto other drives. Duplication and lack of duplication abound. Oh, yeah. The simple reason to do the Home Server? I want data security and I’m tired of managing it myself manually. The Server offers automatic backup and disaster recovery, automatic load-balancing among the drives, a central place of all of our shared files, streaming of media files, plus internet access to both shared files on the server and to our own machines via remote access.

Windows Home Server is available a few different ways. You can get an OEM edition if you purchase hardware along with it. You can buy it as a complete system. HP and a few other manufacturers offer pre-installed devices that are headless machines (you don’t need monitor, mouse, and keyboard) that you can administer via the Administration Panel on one of the client machines. Of course, you can do what I did and for the cost of shipping and handling (about $6) you can get a 120 day eval unit of the software direct from Microsoft. If you are thinking about a home server but don’t feel comfortable digging around in the OS’s guts to make things do what you want them to do, then I highly recommend one of the pre-built systems.

After making sure I had everything I wanted off of the exisiting drives on the machine that was designated to be the server, I added a new 500GB HDD and Gigabit NIC. Yes, the machine was old enough that it only had a 10/100 NIC on board. This is MORE than enough machine to run as a server though. Once that was all done, I hooked ‘er up to the network (more on that below) and started the install. I’d forgotten how long server OS take to install. While it installed I played around with the gaming rig and watched some television. I lost count of restarts and time, but the whole process was a couple of hours.

As far as the home network is concerned, I reconfigured it with a brand-new 8 port gigabit switch at the top of the network. So to summarize, I have my Cable Modem, then a Router hanging off that, then the gigabit switch. I also connected my Vonage router to the router directly. No sense having that bandwidth running over my LAN. We have a gigabit switch in the living room for the consoles and the television stuff, and that is hanging off of the new 8-port as well. All of the local traffic can now work at gigabit(ish) speeds with the exception of devices that don’t support it.

Once the server was nominal and everything was just running, I started installing the Server Connection software on all of the PC’s on the network. This is the client software and allows access to shared files on the server as well as the control panel software that allows you to configure and access the server. First I did this on my gaming machine. I also installed the Server connection software on the other PC and Tark installed it on hers. Once I figured out the vagaries of the remote login procedure and set up my PC’s to have sensible logins with strong passwords (a necessity if you want to allow remote access to your PC’s) I dove into the controls and started to set ‘er up.

With this server software, you can add several HDD to the system, and it just adds them to the storage pool. When you log in, you don’t see a drive C:/, D:/, and so forth. There is just X amount of storage there. The system keeps track of what is where. It automatically duplicates things that you specify to do so across multiple drives. So if one of the drives in there fails, it should cause no problem as the data is redundant across multiple drives. This takes a little storage, so I have a little better than a terabyte of disk space in there. One cool thing is that the server software automatically checks for duplicate files, and skips them on the backups. So ig I have EQ2 installed on all three PC’s, it really only backs up the installation once, and just notes the existence of the files in subsequent backups from other machines. Slick.

I first set up the Automatic Backup to run every night at 2AM, user permissions and sharing access, and remote access to machines outside of the network. Then I forced a manual backup of each machine to see how much space the backups would take up. It ended up taking up a little less than half of the available storage, and I’m a digital packrat. I was impressed. I also wanted to test how the server handled the automatic backup process. This ran overnight last night and ran perfectly on all three PCs. It only seemed to take a nominal amount of additional storage space. Again, functioning as intended.

WHS also acts as a file server, so we’re migrating ALL of the data we have over there so it can get the same treatment, plus be available to whoever on the network needs or wants it.

The web sharing feature lets me log on to the server from any (IE7, although a lot of the features worked in FireFox) remote machine with internet access. I still haven’t successfully set up remote access for the computers. I’m not sure if it’s a setting in windows or on my router that I need to address. I’ll get that figured out and then I’ll be able to log into my machine from anywhere and execute applications or get things from the local hard drives in there. No monthly fee like Go To MY PC, so that is cool. I tested remote server access this morning at work and was able to download and view a few of the videos I have stored there.

It’s also a media streaming machine. That means that I can use my existing XBox360 to view photos, videos, and listen to the music we have shared there. If I get an additional device that I can connect to my tuner in the living room (which already has gigabit network access to the area) that allows me to stream it directly there. If I later get a tuner card for one on the PCs I can then serve the HD video from the server and view it on the large screen HDTV in the living room.

My impression? It could use better documentation. I was eventually able to figure stuff out and get it going, but it was though trial-and-error. I understand it’s a lot easier on the OEM machines, as you would expect. Also easier on the OEM machine is adding storage. I brain-farted and didn’t think about finding Server 2003 drivers for things like my motherboard and raid controller on that machine (they don’t exist.) I was able to work around this at some additional expense. Other than that, I couldn’t be happier. This has solved a lot of issues for me at home vis-a-vis data storage and integrity, along with the bonus of remote access and some other niceties.

The total cost of this experiment? So far I’m into it for an old machine that was waiting to be re-purposed and $300 (New 500GB HDD, 2x gigabit NICs for machines on the network that didn’t support gigabit, an 8-port gigabit switch that I really needed anyway, and a Server 2003-compatable SATA controller. When the 120 day trial is up on the software, I’ll need to purchase that (and I will, at $150 at Newegg.com) along with a piece of hardware, probably another hard disk because you can never have too much storage, for $100. Total end cost? $550 and a retired computer. The basic HP system costs $599, and comes with 500GB of storage. Mine will have 1.5 TB of storage, and I’ll understand how it works better than if I had just purchased a box.

So far I’d have to say that I recommend this solution to you. I’ll let you know down the line if I learn of any significant additional problems or benefits.

Stay backed up and stay safe!