Building a Green Windows Home Server
Home Server Hacks has a great 5 part series on Building a Green Windows Home Server for just over $400. As writer Donavon West writes:
Over 5 parts, this article will show you how to use the Shuttle KPC as a platform to build a full featured, low cost, environmentally friendly (i.e. green) Microsoft Windows Home Server (WHS). This is for those of you who either love to tinker and/or are looking to save a little cash.
After Part 1: Getting started , everything is put together in Part 2: Assembling the Barebones System . Part 3: Creating a bootable Windows Home Server USB Flash Drive and Part 4: Installing Windows Home Server from the USB Flash Drive take us through putting WHS onto a flash drive and installing Windows Home Server from it. Finally in Part 5: Make it Your Own , it’s time to kustomize” your home server via the removable MyKover front panel that works just like a photo frame.
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All this effort given to change WHS, because it’s NOT ready for the public to actually use it in the way that it is sold and advertised.
Is it any wonder as why everyone, is NOT happy with how WHS is sold today?
How about fixing the proven data corruption design flaw in WHS for one thing, right? KB 946676, for which continues to be delayed without resolution! June 2008?
Oh, I just knew “the flaw” would get mentioned somewhere. After all, lest we ACTUAL USERS of WHS forget about…”the flaw.”
By the way, really, everyone is unhappy with it? Even the Tibetan monks?
Yes, there is the Data Corruption bug. Everyone knows about it. Question is: who rubs that in everyone’s face every chance they get? Microsoft haters. Please, don’t be a hater.
As for this system, and all the associated stuff it is totally awsome. And there was only on HDD in it, so it would be immune to the data corruption bug anyways!!! Read up before flaming.
Unfortunately, many customers purchasing are NOT told about the data corruption proven design flaw. So why should Microsoft profit on this, and at the same time delays all resolution in fixing it?
Wouldn’t you want your WHS working correctly, or is data destruction you kind of thing?
How about fixing a proven desgin flaw that causes data corruption? If that’s hating, you ought to hate Microsoft for NOT fixing their own design flaw instead of complaining about other customers wanting their WHS products fixed!
Telling us to waiting half a year, isn’t reasonable for such a serious design flaw. Wake up!
weeeee look at all the spam-bots… same stuff different day. I can’t wait until the bug is fixed, just so this will stop. It won’t of course… but I can dream.
I’ll sit here with my home build WHS just steaming along, enjoying secure back-ups and my files shares (that I don’t edit, and wouldn’t edit if there wasn’t a bug, online) streaming movies to four separate computers.
Best $170 I’ve spent on computers.
(and I’ve actually used it.. have you?)
@ pam
Soooo.. posting this here, where ignornant customers won’t come and find out about how to use a product, does what exactly… Fulfills an inner need to get back at the man?
MS has posted and re-posted guidance on the ‘design-flaw’ admitted it… Its constantly reported by the WHS community and blogs and we’re all waiting for a fix (even if I’ve yet to find anyone in the community that is effected by it…). Perhaps a mass-mailing to all potential customers would be the next step.
What Drashna and I question is why? Every post here, we’re reminded of the same thing? Did the first 1300 posts slamming MS for the ‘design-flaw’ not get read? This is community site, really for people interested in and using WHS in their homes. Why not provide help and assistance to the poor rubes that are ‘forced to buy’ a Microsoft product. Are you also ‘forced to buy’ gas, food, McDonalds?
Seriously…
And since we’re talking design flaw…
I’d much rather wait for a well tested and bulletproof fix, than a hastily fashioned patch or hack that might make things work but bring in more edge cases…
but I really don’t think I’m talking to people that want to reason about the process of creating the fix… they just want the magic bunny in the black box to make the pictures in the picture frame look right.
Here come the RSS feed MS-hater trollers again.
My God, folks – Aren’t we tried of this already?
OK – You hate MS. We get it. You hate WHS. We get it. You hate commercial software and multi-billion dollar companies. W-E G-E-T I-T !!!!
Your constant ranting and raving about all of this crap is boring us to tears! Your efforts are chewing up valuable bandwidth and are basically a drain on the world’s oxygen supply. You keep regurgitating the same bile over and over again like cows chewing their cud. It is tiresome. One person lets go with their rant, and then another has to chime in with essentially the same rant again, in slightly a different form, then other – all of them venting their spleens on such triviality, in the vain attempt to give meaning to their pathetic lives.
Wait. Hold on. I think I get it now – It is a virtual “group hug” for the truly pathetic! Oh – isn’t that special.
Hey, I have an idea. Why don’t you all get out of your respective parent’s basements where you live and actually get out in the sun and out among REAL people. Maybe you can actually all meet in person and then you can rant and rave to your heart’s content about M$ and the injustices of the corporate world together in person. Wouldn’t that be nice?
You can just feel the love from here – can’t you? It’s a beautiful thing.
Yeah, I’m glad Ubuntu’s doing well, downloaded the Hardy torrent using uTorrent on my WHS, and installed it on my laptop.
Wait, uTorrent isn’t supposed to work because of the dreaded bug…
and yet it did… wow. Perhaps the well documented KB946676 bug is an extreme edge case, like the text says.
That said, keep going Ubuntu and canonical competition is good, good competition is better.
I don’t care how big Microsoft has gotten. Every employee at the company should feel that they are part of the test team. When you work at Microsoft and you encounter a serious data-loss bug that also has been reported by customers, your personal blog isn’t the first place to report it.
The end result will be the continued years of waiting for Microsoft to improve – or even debug – its monopoly products, and of course high prices!
Microsoft has NEVER been about energy saving, or for the ecology and environment. NOT even for it’s own anti-competitive behavior.
Microsoft should fire Aaron, as he has shown no respect for WHS customers whom are justified with their real concerns having purchased and paid for WHS as advertsied to be functional without a proven design defect that leads to data corruption.
Especially, being how this serious problem does effect everyone using Windows Home Server in one way or another. In addition, to having been reported and established last year in 2007. Making everyone using WHS still waiting for RELIEF, which isn’t even expected until June 2008.
Customers need resolution, working and functional products as advertised by Microsoft to actually deliver what was claimed.
What Microsoft Windows Home Server customer can be happy about a proven design defect that causes data corruption?
And how many Microsoft customers using a server is going to be happy about the latest reports of ‘Hundreds of thousands’ of Microsoft web servers hacked?
Using WHS is really like playing Russian Roulette. That’s because your data is at risk of being corrupted by a proven design defect (KB 946676) in WHS Drive Extender code. Then one must wonder about how WHS does use the older Windows 2003 Server kernel which was replaced in Vista with Windows 2008 Server kernel in Vista SP1 to offer better security that obviously WHS never got.
Which is worse, having your data corrupted or having your data hacked? Some choice that is for Microsoft customers to ponder about… in addition to the lack of providing energy saving features lacking in WHS…
WHS doesn’t even turn off when NOT in use. No Wake-to-Lan turn on either… No printer server included…
sigh….
Right on Aaron!
I think true lovers of technology will appreciate the breadth and power of what WHS is providing to the home user. WHS removes the complexity that would be required for non-techies, ie. Mom or Dad to successfully backup and maintain their precious data.
We as techs and geeks sometimes are too quick to point out flaws and abnormalites and would rather express a blind devotion to an MS -or- non-MS platform before really trying to understand the spirit of the product in the first place.
Keep up the good work. I need to get back to my WHS box and tinker some more!
“WHS doesn’t do this!” “WHS doesn’t do that!” You conveniently ignore all the things WHS DOES do, advertised and out of the box even. It’s a first generation (“v1”) product, of course it’s not going to make me breakfast and walk my dog for me, nor do I expect it to. I expect it to do as advertised (simple backups, file sharing, remote access), and it does all of those just fine thankyouverymuch. And don’t pull that “proven design flaw” card on me – I am aware of it, thankyouverymuch – it has not affected me even with several drives installed.
“WHS doesn’t even back itself up, so when the WHS HDD fails or crashes there is no backup to restore for all your PC clients…”
See the upcoming Power Pack. But you probably already have and will insist that the late delivery is further “proof” that WHS isn’t ready for the mainstream. No matter what anyone tells you, you won’t listen anyway, you’ll just spout off the same tiresome drivel.