The Web's Largest Dedicated Windows Home Server Resource by Microsoft MVP Philip Churchill.
Microsoft Windows Home Server - WHS will automatically backup and restore your PCs and allow you to share and access files from any machine in the house as well as giving you remote access to those files and PC’s as well. This site will guide you on your journey of discovery with WHS.
If you haven’t heard of Windows Live Mesh then you must have been on Mars for the last few months. The service enables you to seamlessly connect to people, devices, programs and the information you care about, but unfortunately it’s not compatible with WHS, well, not officially.
LiveSide.net have an illustrated tutorial on how to force Live Mesh to install on Windows Home Server. So head on over and try it out.
The guys over in the We Got Served forums have got Media Center 2005 running on Windows Home Server.
Also of interest to you may be The Green Button’s Media Center 2005 on a Windows 2003 Server post which helped accomplish what they were doing.
Have you experienced a slow down to your HP MediaSmart Server after installing PP1 and the 2 HP downloads McAfee’s Total Protection Service and PacketVideo’s PVConnect Media Server?
A number of users have experienced slowdowns due to the PVConnect media indexing task, which runs after installation, compounded by McAfee’s on-access malware protection (per disk-read basis), which makes the disks in the server thrash non-stop. This brings the performance of the entire server down to a crawl and makes the console open extremely slow or completely disappear (crash) when clicking the add-in tabs.
So Why’s It Happening?
The minimum system requirements for the 2 add-ins are an Intel® Pentium® processor or compatible and 64MB RAM (512MB recommended for servers) for McAfee’s Total Protection Service and a Intel® Pentium® 4 processor or compatible (1.6ghz+) 512MB RAM for the PacketVideo’s PVConnect Media Server software. Now after a reboot and at rest, the HP MediaSmart Server has only about 200MB of physical memory available. Installing the add-ins, thus caused the mentioned problems due to lack of sufficient memory.
The Solution
Leave the PVConnect add-in to do its thing and complete its indexing of all your media files, but beware, this has been known to take more than 24 hours to complete and during that time the console can become completely unusable. Meaning, if you did want to uninstall the add-ins during that time you would have to remote desktop onto the server, and launch the console from there to get access to the Settings page to remove PVConnect and McAfee, followed by a reboot to return the server to a usable state.
You could also either uninstall both add-ins, or just McAfee itself, which some users are reporting cures the problem. If you would rather keep them both, then the only real solution is to install more RAM and/or tweak the virtual memory settings on the server.
More information is available from Rafaels Within Windows website.
MediaSmarthome.com has a great guide on protecting your HP MediaSmart Server and home network from viruses and malicious software. The 4 page guide shows you how to secure your wireless network, and tells us about firewall protection and antivirus software. File and folder permissions, user accounts and sharing folders and media are also discussed.
Keeping your home computer stuff safe.
With the new PVConnect software available from HP for MediaSmart users, the Home server Show has a great guide showing you how to access the PVConnect settings from within a browser?
Available here.
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