By Philip Churchill on February 14th, 2008
Home Server Setup Recommendations
Blog “Respect Sakura” has listed 4 important rules in her article entitled Home Server Recommendations Part 1, which include:
- Buy the biggest drive you can afford for your SYS volume
- Why you should Keep your total amount of volumes low e.g. maximum of 4 to 6.
- Use the onboard SATA, and don’t bother with any RAID setups
- When removing a drive, wait a day or two before removing any more
Give it a read for all the info.
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Jaymz’s blog article certainly establishes only more questions about how WHS is buggy, flawed and annoying!
1) You can only copy files smaller than the available free space on the initial DATA volume at any given time.
2) 10 or more drives in this thing, you’ll find performance is going to crawl. You’ll forever see the “Balancing Storage” status in the Home Server console.
3) The other issue is that if the drives are forever active, then they’re more likely to burn out and die quicker!
4) Drive Migrator appears to be rather unforgiving with performance and reliability.
Now we know why there is the annoying 10 user limit…
It sounds like to me WHS needs even more voodoo to make it work than previous Windows server incarnations.
WHS is a step in the wrong direction when you need to limit the number of drives you can stick in the machine because of a feature of the operating system.
How can WHS be considered a reliable way to protect your documents, photos, videos, digital music and backup when KB 946676 states data corruption occurs without any work around?
What reasonable and concerned enthusiast would consider data corruption to be overlooked as Microsoft pitches “with Windows Home Server your family’s files and computers are backed up automatically every day, so you can have peace of mind”, to be acceptable or even considered a reliable way?
Don’t forget,
Microsoft claims, “with Windows Home Server you can connect to your family’s documents, photos, videos and music virtually wherever you are”, except for the fact many Internet Service Providers are blocking WHS.
Keep in mind, anyone trying to get around, such as attempting to bypass their Internet Service Provider for evading the “AUP” Acceptable Use Policies” agreement can get themselves terminated by their ISP.
Something to bear in mind when using WHS…
WHS as a headless operating system makes it extremely difficult during times of troubleshooting the device when the Ethernet connection fails and even doesn’t provide a optical device to bootup or even restore the unit.
How secure is WHS password synchronization plan?
Nobody in any security field, would ever demand both your PC client and your home server use the same password! But, that’s what’s WHS is asking for…
It’s easy to see where this is leading too… both client and server exploitation!
It’s get even more scary when you factor in the following,
Logon names on Home Server should be the same names used on the Home Computers!
A hacker’s dream!
It’s get even more scary when you factor in the following,
Logon names on Home Server should be the same names used on the Home Computers! A hacker’s dream for sure!
RLSLOG – tell me why? why is it different then (let’s say) ADS or Windows domain login (specially, that this is limited to HOME environment). Yes, it is messy in making sure that all machine users are synchronized, but … you are not paying for the convenience.
Roger – the corruption is a BUG not a FEATURE. Microsoft (I am sure) is VERY busy working on a fix.
Just to respond to Charlie K’s wonderful rewording of what I wrote:
“You can only copy files smaller than the available free space on the initial DATA volume at any given time.”
Not a bug, just a design limitation. I explain why it does this, and if you’re aware of it before setting up your own DIY Home Server, you can do something about it – ie, use a bigger drive.
“10 or more drives in this thing, you’ll find performance is going to crawl. You’ll forever see the “Balancing Storage” status in the Home Server console.”
Part bug, part design limitation. Enthusiasts were never the target audience for WHS, it just turned out that enthusiasts were the ones to start snapping WHS up first. Every OEM WHS solution I’ve seen so far hasn’t differed from 4 to 6 drives. I’ll elaborate more on that in a tic..
“The other issue is that if the drives are forever active, then they’re more likely to burn out and die quicker!”
This isn’t a bug, or a design limitation. It’s common goddamn sense. Hard drives die. Fact of life. The more you use something, the more it gets worn out. Sticking with the 4-6 drive rule helps to postpone the inevitable.
“Drive Migrator appears to be rather unforgiving with performance and reliability.”
Yes, if you go crazy like I did, and slap 10 drives at the sucker. I see this as a design limitation – Drive Migrator doesn’t scale well, because I guess the WHS team didn’t perceive home users having racks of SANs attached to OEM solutions in the home.
Okay, that deal with – let me explain my viewpoint here. First off, none of my “rules” or Charlie’s “bugs” really apply to the OEM solutions, because they’re relatively small scale. Except for maybe the drive removal thing, but that’s more of a personal habit after the beta builds bit me pretty nastily doing what I described.
Furthermore, WHS isn’t your typical fileserver or DIY NAS OS, so you shouldn’t try design a system for a typical fileserver or DIY NAS OS. This means buying larger drives, as opposed to arrays of smaller ones, not using RAID solutions, and not getting old rackmount PCs off eBay complete with matching SAN enclosures, or using your Grandmother’s old 933MHz Celeron whitebox. It works differently, and I’m pointing out those differences to better aid in designing a good WHS solution. That’s all.
Jaymz – great comment. I’m tired of all these whiney bi$^@es on here complaining about WHS.
For all you security experts.
How is it any worse than running the computers in a domain with a domain controller? One user name, one password used every where. Hmm not to much differnt from what is done on secure corporate networks.
For every one crying about port 80 being blocked. Get another ISP. I would not sign up with any one that let me do that.
Seems to me like if you’d like to get around the drive number limitation you would go ahead and use a drive controller to stripe or run raid on them and present your drives to WHS as a single volume. Then WHS can do its thing an no problem.
I also agree with Jaymz. The market for WHS wasn’t the enthusiast/techie it was the average home user who will buy one of the WHS boxes at BestBuy and will only touch it till they need to add a drive.
The 10 user limit needs to be clarified for the curious at heart. There is a limit of 10 client installations but this does not equate to the same 10 connections allowed under Windows XP (also not to be confused with the 10 TCP/IP connections at one time). I’ve tested 12 open sessions through windows explorer, browsing shared files. Net session was used to confirm the 12 open sessions by 12 unique computers. This won’t fly in XP. This doesn’t change the 10 client limit but when sharing multiple resources you won’t run into the dreaded maximum connections reached like you would with XP and open sessions.
Hope that helps someone.
Hi WHS tester,
Thanks for the info.
Hi, I was wondering if there is any way to change the 10 user limit on WHS? If anybody knows how to do that i would greatly appreciate that.
Thanks for any thoughts!