MS Windows Home Server

By Philip Churchill on October 19th, 2011

Liquesce–A Drive Pooling Solution

A drive pooling solution by the name of Liquesce has come to our attention.

Although its in the early stages of development, Liquesce (although not specifically for Windows Home Server) is defiantly one to watch:

The driving force behind the Liquesce code base is to take you hard drives that have Space / Directories and merge them into a single representation in an explorer view. This is very similar to the “Drive Extender” functionality in WHS, but without the need to format your drives 🙂

The storage pool can use any type and size of hard drive, including SATA, IDE, ESATA, FIREWIRE, USB etc.

If the drives have the same directory representation i.e. Movies on the root of both, then these will be merged into a single Movies directory within the view.

Writing to this merged pool will have different strategies dependent on the setup, e.g. Folder / Balanced / Priority.

Also there are advanced options which will allow similar modes to WHS Mirroring (_backup).

More information on Liquesce can be found here.

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By Philip Churchill on October 18th, 2011

Add-In: AWIECO WakeOnLAN 1.1.3

The AWIECO WakeOnLAN add-in has been updated to version v1.1.3 with new features in the PRO version.

With the ability to remotely turn on a computer, here is the full change log:

Added: Scheduler (PRO)
Added: Server shut down in Launchpad (PRO)
Added: Language: Japanese, Polish
Fixed: Issues with deleted computers

More info on AWIECO WakeOnLAN can be found here.

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By Philip Churchill on October 18th, 2011

Add-In: StableBit Scanner for WHS 2011 2.0.0.1169

The StableBit Scanner version for Windows Home Server 2011, Windows Small Business Server 2011 Essentials and Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 Essentials has had an update.

Version 2.0.0.1169 beta of the advanced hard disk surface scanner has the following changes:

Don’t crash if the drive doesn’t report an interface.
Fixed crash when opening disk context menu with no disk IDENTIFY.

More information on StableBit Scanner can be found here.

add-ins • Windows Home Server

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By Philip Churchill on October 17th, 2011

The BYOB Podcast Episode 62

BYOB Episode 62 is up with lots of discussion including rack or not? helping a listener with his huge home build for his home network and does the AMD Bulldozer push Intel out of the top slot?

“We only give our brief impressions based on testing from some of our favorite sites. So all this conjecture is without any hands on testing, but general consensus is Bulldozer doesn’t provide the bang for the buck that AMD is known for and it performance is on par at best against Intels current popular offerings, but with Intel’s Big powerhouse SB-E on the x79 platform coming in Q1 2012 and Ivy Bridge being released shortly (we hope) thereafter. We don’t see any reason to choose AMD over Intel. No advantage in performance or price…”

All this and more on BYOB episode 62.

News • Windows Home Server

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By Al West on October 17th, 2011

iCloud Photo Stream with WHS 2011

This is just a quick post to say that iCloud works fine on Windows Home Server 2011. Thought Apple don’t list Windows Server 2008 R2 or WHS 2011 as a compatible product I’ve installed iCloud without any issues on my Windows Home Server and it’s been happily downloading photos sent by an iPhone 4 over the past week.

Simply logon to your Windows Home Server via RDP and go to http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1455 and download the iCloud Control Panel for Windows. Install the application as normal but due to the fact it registers a new component with the Windows control panel you will need to reboot before you can access the system control panel. Don’t install iCloud unless you can reboot right away or live without the control panel until your server is rebooted.

After you have rebooted you can go to the Windows control panel and find the new iCloud control panel applet:

You will be prompted to enter in your Apple ID and password and if you don’t have an iCloud account there will be some words to agree to as is the norm these days. Once you have completed the sign in/up process you’ll see the main control panel. From here I only selected to enable the Photo Stream option. I don’t have Outlook installed nor do I want to sync my Bookmarks with Internet Explorer:

Select the “Options…” button and then change the Download Folder to a Shared Folder on your Windows Home Server. I decided to make a new sub-folder in my Pictures share and left the Upload folder at default as I don’t plan to upload photos from the server to iCloud. Do note that if you set this folder to a location where you will save photos on your network then you will potentially fill up your iCloud quota quite quickly:

That’s it! A very straight-forward way to sync all your photos from mobile Apple devices to your Windows Home Server. In testing we found the latency from taking a photo on the iPhone to be able to retrieve it from the remote access website to be well under a minute.

Tutorial • Windows Home Server

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By Philip Churchill on October 17th, 2011

The Server Folders and Hard Drives tab in WHS 2011

A further look into the Windows Home Server 2011 Dashboard and this time its the Server Folders and Hard Drives tab.

DavesComputerTips.com takes us through folder properties, the sharing tab, and the following wizards in WHS 2011:

Move a Folder
Customize Server Backup
Add a Folder

All this plus Shadow Copies are all taken a look at in this interesting read by Dave Hartsock, which you can find here.

Tutorial • Windows Home Server

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By Philip Churchill on October 17th, 2011

Working with Windows Small Business Server 2011 Essentials

Kim Spilker on the Microsoft Press blog over on MSDN provides sample information on the new book, "Working with Windows Small Business Server 2011 Essentials".

Providing a sample chapter the post goes through The Dashboard, User Management, Improved File Management, Remote Web Access, Data Protection, Installation and Migration.

You can grab yourself a copy from either Amazon in the US or the UK.

News • Windows Home Server

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By Philip Churchill on October 16th, 2011

Add-In: Snoop-de-dupe 1.50

The Snoop-de-dupe add-in has been updated to version 1.50

Snoop-de-dupe automatically scans your server storage and displays duplicate files in an easy-to-view layout directly from within the server’s user Console.

Version 1.50 includes the following enhancements and new features:

New Features:

Enhanced database design for better handling of larger file sets (100,000+ files)
Allow automatic exclude of files based on file size (minimum and maximum)
Allow automatic exclude of files based on file attributes (hidden, system, read-only)
Added a progress dialog to the Batch Resolve dialog to better communicate operation status during lengthy deletion and hard-link operations
Added a new "reclaimed data" field to easily view the amount (file count and file size) of estimated reclaimed data (from delete and hard-link operations) directly within the Add-in

Enhancements:

Limit the number of duplicate files in the main duplicate list to 20. Larger duplicate lists could make the Dashboard appear frozen for some time
View remaining trial days directly within the Add-in
Minor bug and usability issues

Snoop-de-dupe is priced at $14.99 and a 15 day free trial is also available

Existing users can download the new version directly from the WHS Dashboard (from the Snoop-de-dupe tab select | More Settings | Check for Software Update)

More details on Snoop-de-dupe can be found here.

add-ins • Windows Home Server

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By Philip Churchill on October 16th, 2011

Drive Bender Released

Its out of beta and its been officially released.

Division-M have released Drive Bender, a Drive Extender type add-in for Windows Home Server 2011 users and to celebrate the guys are currently offering a single license for home use only and life time support for $40, plus a 30 day full trial version is also available

Supports WHS 2011, SBS 2011 and Storage Server 2011
Native Windows Server dashboard addin
Seamless integration with the existing hard drives tab
Regain the power of Drive Extender in WHS 2011

Here is a run down on the features of Drive Bender:

What is it? Drive Bender is state of the art, single point storage pool technology for Microsoft Windows. Drive Bender presents multiple hard drives as a single pool of storage, either as one or more drive letters, or a network shared drive.

Expandability Drive Bender also provides the user with the ability to seamless expand their storage pool by simply adding a new drive. Adding a new drive expands the pool by the size of the new drive while retaining the existing data.

Drive merging and converting Drive Bender also offers a merge capability, allowing users to take a drive and merge that drive into the pool. In addition there is also a drive conversion feature, converting an existing drive into a Drive Bender pooled drive.

Data redundancy To further ensure data safety, Drive Bender can automatically duplicate any file added to a Drive Bender pool. File duplication is determined at the folder level and occurs on the fly

Non-destructive One of the key Drive Bender features is its non-destructive file system technology. All drives within a Drive Bender pool utilize the standard NTFS format and file structures, making your data accessible under any circumstance.

Ease to try Because of our non-destructive file system, taking Drive Bender for a test drive is easy. Simply specify the drives to be included in the pool, and you are ready go. Drives can be used without formatting, and the existing data remains untouched.

Here is the change log for v1.2.1.0 release (2011-10-14):

Update: Transaction are no longer persisted between restarts (this was causing a lot of ongoing issues, mostly with users migrating from older versions).
Bug fix: The handling of remote Drive Bender servers is now working correctly for duplication, running task, notifications and logs.
Bug fix: The duplication window now updates correctly after a change to the state of a folder.
Bug fix: Merging and converting a drive now removes all existing Windows drive letter before the operation. This helps to ensure no files / folder get locked again if a reboot is required.
Bug fix: Coping / moving a file to the pool could result in the destination files having it’s attributes striped.
Bug fix: The health monitor is less likely to be interrupted resulting in better file monitoring and file count statistics.
Bug fix: The health monitor thread is now slower executing, resulting in even less (no) load on the server.

More information on Drive Bender can be found here.

add-ins • Windows Home Server

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By Philip Churchill on October 15th, 2011