Ian Dixen is back from CES with an interview from Todd Headrick from the Windows Home Server team for his Media Center Show. Todd in his 14 minute interview talks about Power Pack 1 which can be heard in this Podcast approx 25 minutes in.
A iTunes and direct download link are available.
The guys over on at the German home server blog has posted (in English) an interview with the Product Manager for Fujitsu Siemens who discusses details about the SCALEO Home Server and SCALEO Power Management add-in.
Read it here.
Business technology site InformationWeek have a comprehensive review of Windows Home Server. The 6 page article discusses the features available within the software and for those of you that don’t want to go the DIY route it discusses what’s available off the rack. Finally third-party software available for Home Server is also looked at.
Website Home Server Hacks have a tutorial on changing your web site image on the Windows Home Server remote access site.
Read it here.
PC Magazine looks at the best network storage for home and small business. Included in the roundup is the HP MediaSmart Server EX470, the LaCie Ethernet Disk mini–Home Edition, the Iomega StorCenter Pro 150d (3 terabyte) and finally the NetApp StoreVault S300.
We wont spoil it for you but one of them won the Editors Choice award – Now which one was it?
Find out here.
Macworld Expo is under way in San Francisco and CEO Steve Jobs has announced Apple’s new offering which will be available from this February (2008).
Time Capsule will automatically back up every Mac in the home with its large server grade hard drive and a built in Airport Express base station using the wireless 802.11n protocol which offers 4 gigabit Ethernet ports.
Price is good at $299 for the 500GB Time Capsule and $499 for the 1TB model but it is missing a few features. Hard drive duplication like Windows Home Server does is not there, as well as online access to files and Apple being Apple the hard drive isn’t user replaceable either.
So it is not really on par with Home Server but it does compare well with the single-drive external backup drives, from the likes of Western Digital and Seagate.
Lots more info is available from Apple.
Musings, Ramblings, and the Occasional Useful Information is what The Sean Blog is all about and they currently have a list of the top 25 blogs on TechNet and MSDN. And currently at the number 2 position is the Windows Home Server Team Blog. Yahoo, open the champagne….is there a doctor in the house!?!
Sorry I’ve recovered now. Checkout the list as there are some good blogs in there.
Windows Home Server Disk Management is a new add-in which is an extension of the server storage interface, making it easier to identify the hard drives via a visual display. Seeing which drive is the system drive and the amount of data being used on each drive has now become easier.
Features Pending:
The big image on the right will be replaced by a picture of your computer case (as specified by you), with drive bays mapped to disk locations. Select a disk from the list, and the appropriate drive bay is highlighted in the image.
The “Repair” button isn’t hooked up yet; I haven’t been able to figure out how to make a drive fail so I could test my repair code (and I won’t release stuff I can’t test). You’ll still get an “unhealthy” status + icon if WHS thinks the disk is bad; you’ll just need to change back to Server Storage to run the repair.
Notes:
The current WMI crawl is very slow; I’m relying on some Windows calls that aren’t very efficient. With multiple disks, the initial load and any refresh of the add-in may take longer than 1 minute. You’ll see your CPU spike during this time.
WMI doesn’t really know what the underlying hardware is, it can only report back on what Windows thinks is there. If your SATA controller is lying to Windows and pretending to be IDE, your disks will be labeled as IDE.
The download and support information is available from here.
HP emailed me yesterday with details about the Windows Home Server data corruption issue. Here’s what they had to say:
On December 21st, Microsoft announced that in some situations, customers could experience data corruption/loss when using Windows Home Server. While this issue occurs only during specific simultaneous combinations of activities under specific circumstances, HP and Microsoft are taking this issue very seriously. MS is working hard on a fix, and HP will make sure that this fix gets pushed to all MediaSmart Server owners through the automated software update mechanism. We will also communicate additional information updates to our user base through MediaSmart user communities and Home Sever blogs.
MS is now able to reproduce the problem, and we expect that the fix will be tested and delivered in the coming weeks.
Here are a couple key things to be aware off:
- If you are operating the HP MediaSmart Server with a single HDD, then this issue should not impact you.
- This issue does not impact the data on the server from PC backups. You can continue to be confident in your automatic PC backups.
Until the final fix is available, HP is making the following suggestions to current multi-Hard Disk Drive MediaSmart Server owners:
- You should not directly open and/or edit files that are stored on the MediaSmart Server while doing any other activity such as large data transfers or media streaming. If you are doing a large data transfer or streaming and need to edit a file on the server, you should first copy the file over to a PC and then open it for editing.
- There are a few key applications that Microsoft has identified that can cause this issue when files are opened and edited directly from the server. However to be safe, HP recommends that you not open/edit files directly from the server until this fix is delivered.
- A known list of offending applications can be found on the URL below.
- HP recommends that frequently-edited and frequently-opened files be stored on both your PC drives and the server until a fix to this issue has been delivered.
More background information can be found on Microsoft’s support site on the following link: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/946676/en-us
Blogger Scott Hanselman has the details on how to turn on duplication of the backups database, which is disabled by default on Windows Home Server.
Scott says that there could be a performance hit once it is enabled via a registry key and reminds us that it is totally unsupported but as he states “it’s nice to know it’s there“.
Get the details here.
