Windows Home Server Power Pack 1 Released

[Jason Dunn]

<p><em>"The team is pleased to announce that Windows Home Server Power Pack 1 has been released to manufacturing (RTM) and is now available on the Microsoft Download Center!... As many know, Power Pack 1 provides a range of new enhancements, including support for home computers running Windows Vista x64 editions, backup of home server Shared Folders, improvements to remote access, more efficient power consumption and improved performance. And, of course, it delivers a fix for the data corruption bug."</em></p><p><img src="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com/resizer/thumbs/size/600/dht/auto/1216426493.usr1.jpg" border="0" /></p><p>After many months, and many betas, the Windows Home Server Power Pack 1 is officially released. The download is live on <a href="http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=1A6AEF46-DB57-401F-814F-6EFA26E7A1E8&amp;displaylang=en" target="_blank">Windows Download Center</a> and that seems to be the only way to get it right now because when I did a Windows Update on my Windows Home Server it found no updates. I suspect that will change later today though. Power Pack 1 adds a bunch of new features, so if you have a WHS, it's definitely worth getting. I'm going to attempt the manual download and install now - I'll let you know how it goes!</p><p><strong>UPDATE:</strong> It's impressive how small Microsoft can make updates when they have a known set of parameters to work with. The Power Pack 1 update was a svelte 22.5 MB in size, and the update completed in about two minutes. It seemed like it took longer than normal for my WHS to come back up after the reboot, so I went into my back room to check on it. It has rebooted, but gave me an error message about a missing driver. I clicked OK and left it at the login screen. I should explain that I have a home-built WHS with a monitor and keyboard connected to it, which is a scenario most WHS users won't have. I walked back to my office and my PCs were now able to see the WHS. I noticed a Backup Database Repair wizard, and it found problems with my backups. This has been a persistent problem I've had with my WHS install since I moved from the beta to the final version over a year ago. I've done the manual fix several times, but it never seemed to keep things straight for very long. At the moment I'm letting the Backup Database Repair run, and I'm hoping I don't lose some of my oldest manual backups because I started using WHS to image my machines in clean states instead of <a href="http://www.aconis.com" target="_blank">Acronis TrueImage</a> (largely because the latter has become somewhat unreliable over the past year).</p>

[Phillip Dyson]

I've been mulling over building a WHS setup but haven't started on it yet. Not sure if it makes more sense to assemble my own, or buy an appliance.

Jason, I would be curious to know what your setup looks like.

[Jason Dunn]

I've been mulling over building a WHS setup but haven't started on it yet. Not sure if it makes more sense to assemble my own, or buy an appliance.

My advice? Get one of the pre-built ones, specifically the HP server if you want the ability to add more drives easily. HP also added some secret sauce to the software; things like an iTunes server.

Jason, I would be curious to know what your setup looks like.

Big and ugly would be my description for it. :D I have a mid-tower case, an old Celeron-based system (although it is 3.2 Ghz, and it's the newer Celeron revision that performs quite well), 1 GB RAM, and a bunch of hard drives. As in, five internal drives and four external drives. A bit over 3 TB total storage, but frankly I'm pondering getting rid of all of it and buying an HP unit...if I get the 1 TB unit, which has 2 x 500 GB drives in it, and I slap another 2 x 500 GB drives in there (or maybe 2 x 750 GB), I can have all the storage I need and all in a small, quieter, much more energy efficient package.

[Felix Torres]

I've been mulling over building a WHS setup but haven't started on it yet. Not sure if it makes more sense to assemble my own, or buy an appliance.


I have a home-built, for what its worth.
No significant problems.
(Have you built your own PC before?)

Its in an old, old Atec tower case I got about six years ago to serve as a server; 10 drive bays, tons of fans, etc. Doesn't need much CPU power: I'm using an old Celeron 1.7 GHz with a 320Gb drive as the system disk. I added dual SATA PCI cards each controlling dual 500GB drives.

Only been using it for a couple months but it was a breeze to set up; it recognized all my hardware and configured itself without user intervention.
Took less than an hour to install; less than two including the time to take out the old 200GB drives (once upon a time they were SOA) and slip in the new drives.
Asked me a total of two questions: system name and admin password.
Took two clicks to set up media file streaming.

I'm quite happy.
(I'll be happier when I take time to install the update.)

[Phillip Dyson]

(Have you built your own PC before?)



I've built a PC before. It was my original SageTV Media Center. I've since moved to a Dell Core 2 Duo.

I guess when I said "build" I was really referring to buying a computer, installing WHS and maybe buying more hard drives.

Putting in a processor and motherboard was fun, but for this, I find that I'm not so willing to invest the time or mental energy. Probably why I'm not seriously looking a homemade linux solution.

[Felix Torres]

I've built a PC before. It was my original SageTV Media Center. I've since moved to a Dell Core 2 Duo.

I guess when I said "build" I was really referring to buying a computer, installing WHS and maybe buying more hard drives.




In that case, you would probably be better off with a pre-built WHS box from the likes of HP. As always, building your own is mostly about customizing the hardware; if you're not going to do much of that, a factory server will likely be better/cheaper. (WHS by itself is hardly cheap; MS prices it as what it is, a member of the Windows Server family instead of as a desktop version.)

[ricksfiona]

This looks interesting. I would love to get my data out of my p.c. and onto something like this. However, I have a few questions:

1) Can I assign drive letters to the drives/folders?
2) Remote Access. Do you have to have a static ip or does HP provide a free remote access solution?

[Jason Dunn]

1) Can I assign drive letters to the drives/folders?
2) Remote Access. Do you have to have a static ip or does HP provide a free remote access solution?

1) Yes. You can map the network folders to a local drive letter. On all my PCs for instance I have my Public Drive folder mapped to Z:

2) Microsoft provides a free dynamic DNS service that works really nicely. I can access my server, and any of my PCs, from anywhere in the world. It's awesome. :)

[Phillip Dyson]

One of the reasons why I want a WHS system, is to get better control over who can access shared folders. Does WHS give you more access control than standard windows?

I would like to say specific users on certain machines have priveleges on the WHS box.

[Jason Dunn]

One of the reasons why I want a WHS system, is to get better control over who can access shared folders. Does WHS give you more access control than standard windows?

Well, I wouldn't say it gives you MORE control than Windows Vista (or are you on XP?) but it certainly gives you really EASY control. You can specify who can access each shared folder, both read and write access. It's very easy.