MS Windows Home Server

Look Familiar?

Looking similar to the Windows Home Server “Hockey Puck” is Sony’s white “Liblog Station” due to launch  in Japan on May 17th.

The compact home server device comes with either 1TB (500GB × 2) of storage on the VGF-HS1S model or 1.5TB (750GB × 2) on the VGF-HS1 model. Alongside Gigabit Ethernet, 3 USB ports and memory card slots.

More details are available from Slash Gear.

KeepVault, the online backup solution for Windows Home Server has been updated to version 2.20:

• Added a per-file “percent complete” status field to view the progress of the current file being protected
• Added archive-bit method to optimize file scanning and CPU access (Note: you must run the referenced utility to convert your existing KeepVault database to use this feature)
• Added “Clear History” option to save valuable hard drive space on your WHS
• Fixed bug: potential upload of files greater than 5GB
• Fixed bug: potential duplicate uploading of files after disable/enable protected WHS Shares or incorrect PC shutdown

This latest version and upgrade instructions for KeepVault Windows Home Server are available from here.

MediaSmart Drive Labeler is a new add-in from Jerry McCollom which updates the drive labels on the HP MediaSmart Server’s as follows:

• Drives are correctly labeled as SATA rather than SCSI.
• The drive bay location is appended to internal SATA drives
• External SATA drives are correctly shown as External rather than Internal.

More info is available from here.

A couple of articles which may be of interest to you as a Windows Home Server user are Troubleshooting Motherboard Problems: 5 Real World Examples from enthusiast site ExtremeTech and the Digital Alchemy website has a list of Hard Drive Diagnostic and Repair Tools. All good stuff if our home Server’s go pear shaped!

Benjamin Robichaud has updated his add-in that displays the Windows Event Logs, also known as Event Viewer in the Home Server Console. Once installed you can choose which log to monitor, filter the entries with Show All, Warnings, Errors, etc and clear the logs as well.

Version 1.1.0.0 includes the following:

• Fix : only displays the last 500 entries of a Log, thus preventing the console to freeze while iterating over too many items.
• Fix : ‘Show Relevant’ now only displays ‘Warnings’ and ‘Errors’.
• New : ‘Show Unknowns’ is now available under the ‘Filter’ dropdown box.
• New : displays the event ID, per request. 

Event viewer can be downloaded from here.

Thanks to We Got Served for the update details.

Steve Rowe has posted on his blog how he uses Drobo and Windows Home Server both together. Drobo is a flexible RAID solution from Data Robotics Inc.

The How-To Geek has published part 3 (with links to parts 1 and 2 if you missed them) of its setting up Windows Home Server series. Based around the Velocity Micro unit, in this part the geek loads everything up!

Read it here.

Paul Jenkins has a great article on selecting a CPU and Motherboard for WHS that have low power usage and low noise output. Meet the contenders here.

With Windows Home Server now being sold in 47 different countries around the world, the Windows Home Server World Cup results for April look very interesting. Norway remains in 1st position, with New Zealand less than 100 units away from first place, assuming Norway stands still. 

From the WHS Team Blog the top 8 countries are:

1. Norway
2. New Zealand
3. United States
4. Germany
5. United Kingdom
6. Denmark
7. Australia  
8. Switzerland

The standings are computed by taking Windows Home Server sales divided by the number of households with a broadband connection in each country. Updated standings will be published next month. 

The Home Server Show is a new fortnightly Podcast by David McCabe. In the first episode David discusses our site amongst other WHS enthusiast sites and also chats with Ian Dixon from The Media Center Show. David adds that he hopes that The Home Server Show will eventually be made available weekly in the future.