By on November 23rd, 2007

More Reviews

Scouring the web we have four reviews on Windows Home Server for you. The first is from ZDNet where Adrian Kingsley-Hughes describes Building a Windows Home Server – the easy way! Where Adrian points out the best hardware to use. From CPU and motherboard through Heatsink and fan to Ram, Hard drives and more.

Gadget and consumer electronics site engadget asks How would you change Windows Home Server? They are asking just how satisfied you are with the final product and the (at present) 98 reader comments that are left are well worth a read.

Another review with the perspective of using Windows Home Server in the office environment is Jamie Bsales article Windows Home Server: At Home in the Office.

Finally Connected Home show you how WHS can back up every computer in your home network in Coming Home to Windows Home Server, Part 2.

News • Windows Home Server
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By on November 23rd, 2007

Hush HS1 Home Server

Hush Front

German manufacturer Hush has released it’s HS1 Home Server. With a power consumption of 45 watts the fanless device is available with a storage capacity of 500GB to 2TB.

Hush Back  

Base price is expensive at €923.53 and includes 1GB DDR2 Memory, 10/100 LAN (Gb LAN upgrade available) and 500GB of storage.

Hush Colours 

The aluminum case is available to order in 3 different colors.

More information (in German) from Hush Technologies and again thanks to the German Homeserver Blog for the details.

Hardware • Windows Home Server
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By on November 23rd, 2007

SCALEO Home Server 1500 available for Pre-order in Germany

Scaleo-Germany

Fujitsu Siemens online shop in Germany are offering the SCALEO Home Server 1500 for Pre-order with an expected delivery date of February 2008.

Thanks to German language Homeserver Blog for the details.

Hardware • Windows Home Server
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By on November 23rd, 2007

Tranquil PC's NEW T2-WHS-A3

Tranquil PC have another Windows Home Server system, the T2-WHS-A3. Due to be released December 12th (2007) it has a the similar low power (29W) benefits of the T2-WHS-A2, but is limited to 10/100 LAN, although the GBe option is optional at an additional £12 and one eSATA card providing four ports.

T2-WHS-A2

Available in satin black the front panel has a ‘glass effect’ with cool lighting and laser etching for the Power / HDD activity LED’s the unit looks really classy.

  • The system, being fanless, is optimized for near silent operation, and has exceptional reliability characteristics.
  • Powered by the Intel 220CPU for outstanding performance.
  • The standard unit is desk top mounted, but there are options for 19″ rack mounting, wall mounting, or floor mounting
  • Rear panel 12V DC power in / 4x USB2.0 / 10/100 LAN
  • Power supply External AC/DC with country specific power cord
  • PCI expansion 1x slots (spare or populated with Gbe LAN or eSATA 4 port card)
  • HDD support 2x 3.5” HDD support, in cooled, shock resistant sub system
  • Power consumption 29W (base unit)
  • Warranty  24 months RTB

More info and ordering details for the £348 (Excluding VAT at 17.5%) T2-WHS-A3 are available from Tranquil PC.

Hardware • Windows Home Server
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By on November 22nd, 2007

Client Info Add-In

Eric Maurer has posted details about his first add-in he has created on the WHS forums. It uses Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) to get hardware information from the WHS Server machine as standard, and also from the client computers after supplying the usernames and passwords for them. This information displays your processor, memory, IP address, drive size, drive temp, and if a drive SMART failure is predicted.

Firewall settings may need to be adjusted to permit WMI on the client machines.

Client Info

More information and the download are available from Eric Maurer’s WHS Add-In Page.

Support is also available from the Client Info Add-In thread in the WHS forum.

add-ins • Windows Home Server
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By on November 22nd, 2007

Linux WHS Alternative HipServ

LaCie Ethernet Disk mini

In the past we have posted information about Linux alternatives to Windows home Server including the Ubuntu Home Server Edition Project.

Today I have details of another Linux based product that claims to offer all the features of Windows Home Server. Its HipServ from Axentra Corporation based out of Canada. It has recently been released by LaCie on one of their NAS drives and sells for $199 USD which includes both the software platform pre-installed and a 500GB NAS drive. It allows you to do automated backups from Windows or Mac computers in your home – it is fully Mac compatible with OS 10.3 and 10.4, and they’re working on testing with Leopard now. It allows you to access content remotely through a browser, or from a mobile device (WM5, WM6, Blackberry and iPhone). They even include a DLNA compliant and Windows Media Connect media server on board, so you can access content from your Sony Playstation 3, xBox 360, Roku, and others. Axentra are also working on a VM version of the product which will run on a Windows based PC as well.

More details are available from the Axentra web site and from LaCie.

Many thanks to Antonio for the information.

News • Windows Home Server
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By on November 21st, 2007

Add-In: Tab Reorderer

Developer Brendan Grant has another add-in for us. Tab Reorderer enables you to change the order of the tabs which are displayed on the main window in the Windows Home Server console.

Tab Reorderer  

To install place the downloaded msi file into the \\SERVER\Software\Add-Ins folder and install normally via the console add-ins tab. Once installed the settings are available via Settings, Tab Reorderer. All third party tabs can now be moved by highlighting and pressing the appropriate direction button. Once done, click the OK or Apply button and then restart the Home Server Console (optionally with the prompt).

The location of the 4 official Microsoft tabs (Computers & Backup, User Accounts, Shared Folders and Server Storage) cannot be changed so the red X button is provided so that a user can select (likely on the first run of the add-in) which tabs the user doesn’t want to have displayed in the add-in’s list in future.

Download from here.

add-ins • Windows Home Server
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By on November 21st, 2007

Trusted Certificate from Microsoft Street Value $100 5 Year Expiration Date – FREE

As previously posted the update due on Tuesday November 27th will amongst many other things improve the remote access experience for Windows Home Server users by providing them with a “trusted SSL certificate” for their home servers. That means customers will be able to access their home server from outside the home without any security warnings being generated by the web browser.  GoDaddy, a leading provider of Web domain addresses, is the provider of the free trusted certs which have a 5 year expiration date with a street value of $100 – all for free!

More details on GoDaddy’s SSL Certificate’s are available in the PDF guide Why you need a SSL Certificate.

Remotely • Windows Home Server
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By on November 20th, 2007

November Update Package for WHS

We posted yesterday about a update package from Microsoft that is going to cure most of the remaining problems that some users were experiencing with Windows Home Server:

  • You will no longer receive certificate warnings in the Web browser when you access your Web site by using an external URL.
  • Data files that contain NTFS alternate data streams may be corrupted on a Windows Home Server computer has been addressed.
  • Windows Home Server Drive Extender may not update read-only attributes from the master shadow to the alternate shadow. Therefore, Microsoft Money backup files may not be successfully stored in Windows Home Server shared folders. This problem is resolved after you apply this update package.

And this is only 3 of the 7 updates that are in the update package, with other included updates either adding a new feature or curing a problem.

Well, good news the KB article has now been posted at Microsoft’s Knowledge Base and although entitled “An update for Windows Home Server lets you obtain a trusted certificate for your Windows Home Server computer during remote access configuration of your personalized domain”, (that was a mouthful) it does a lot more than just that one trusted certificate update. All the details are in the KB941914 article.

This November update package will be available from Windows Update for Windows Home Server from Tuesday 27th November (2007). And most issues that people have been experiencing with WHS will (hopefully) be a thing of the past. Personally I can’t wait!

News • Windows Home Server
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By on November 20th, 2007

Technical Brief for Home Computer Backup and Restore

Windows_Home_Server_Home_Co

Technical Brief for Home Computer Backup and Restore is another technical brief from Microsoft for Windows Home Server. This 26 page PDF document provides an in-depth look at the features and functionality of WHS Home Computer Backup and Restore complete with an overview of the backup process along with it’s features, functionality and benefits.

Backup and restore are covered in depth showing us how it is implemented and how backups are stored. We are shown how to do a restore for both individual files/folders and for a complete PC as well. A great tip included in this white paper is how to save and restore a copy of the backup database in case you lose a single hard drive.

PDF download from here.

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