Rob’s Digital Life

I’ve been pretty busy here over the best couple of weeks, we got a couple of big projects on the go. so blogging. as it takes the longest amount of time of all online activities, has taken a back seat of late.

So I thought I’d write an update on the windows home server project..

Just for some background, we recently bought a new PC for the office, thus freeing up the old 1.7ghz 512mb ram loud PC. Rather than chucking the loud PC out, I replaced the CPU fan with a near silent fan, and bought a copy of WHS,

As it stands the WHS box is sat in a closet connected to the network via wi-fi (54mbps), it has an 80gb HD in it along with a 120gb HD and I’ve now connected the 400gb USB HD to it too, so it’s got 600gb’s of space.

I don’t know whether it’s clever enough to cope with me ripping out the 80gb at some point and swapping in a 400gb and it just deals with it or whether the server has to have a rebuild, any ideas?

Also what I’ve found so far, is I need to log into the box with a screen and keyboard as the wireless network needs a user to be logged in for it to fire up. This is the main reason for the recent purchase of 200mb powerline devices to connect the WHS back to the switch physically. The second reason is that backing up 100gb of stuff over wi-fi takes an age, so a 100mb ethernet connection should improve the speed of the backups too.

So within the next few days the current set up will be ripped out and re-installed into the closest with the new powerline connectors and a new surge protector for the power too.

Once the powerline connectivity is in place, I’ll set it to wake on lan and I can ditch the spare monitor and keyboard and just use remote desktop from the main PC to do any configuration once it’s setup.

As it stands though it’s working fine, it performs small backups if nothing major has changed, but if there’s significant changes then it performs a full back up which a longer amount of time. The shared drives work great for storing stuff, which is needed on multiple PC’s. The idea is if you have several PC’s rather than having the photo’s on all of them, you store the photo’s on the shared folders which all the PC’s (and Mac’s) have access to.

The upside of the shared folders is that you can get to them from the web. When you setup WHS you setup a domain something.homeserver.com, this allows you to gain access to your shared files from anywhere. You can also great a guest area and allow people to come in and collect docs or files that you wish to share. The WHS also duplicates the data in the shared files across the HD’s so that if a HD fails you don’t loose you’re data.

On the whole I’m very pleased with the device. I’m looking forward to connecting it physically to the network so it’s more robust in terms of connectivity and quicker in terms of backup.

The other thing I’m going to do is turn off auto updates, because the other morning I can down to find it had rebooted itself in the night and hadn’t rejoined the network as nobody has logged back in so it missed the backup. The plan here will be to run the updates in a controlled fashion during the day and then turn it off, and leave the server running again, in the knowledge that it won’t get rebooted by MS.