Trigger Finger

Our house at times must resemble something of a wet dream for Microsoft. Of the four or five computers in use, 4 run Windows (mostly Vista) and only one multiboots between Windows and a variety of Nix distros. We used Media Centre extensively to pump content to an XBox 360 in the living room which provides the focus of content consumption on the big screen TV.

Ours is probably a typical house in terms of what we want to store on the computers. 95% of it is media such valuable family photos, videos and recorded TV (via a digital tuner using the excellent Media Centre), and of course a music collection that has developed over the years to something like 20,000 tracks. A tiny proportion of all the data in the house is ‘work related.’ Probably a few hundred documents between the users, some photoshop files and a load of web stuff. In terms of gigabytes this ‘work content’ is probably less than 1 GB of the TB or so of data we have stored. So although the work content is important, the main use of the computers is to provide content to whoever wants it, either on one of the PC’s (rare) or on the TV in the living room (most of the time).
Although media content is important, most of it is replacable. Obviously some isn’t but most could be re-downloaded, re-ripped or similar. What can’t be replaced is the 5 or 6 years of photographs from the digital cameras, that precious home movie of the dog or kids, and of course that work-content may be found in a sent email, but if not will be a huge chore to recreate.

So, in our house (and I expect many others too) one PC tends to act as ‘the server.’ It stores all the media, is in fact a Media Centre itself (Vista Ultimate) and is left switched on 24 hours a day doing the long downloads, the bittorrent client lives there, backups are stored there, and it has remote access for people to access files from wherevere they may be in the world. In fact if you have Vista Ultimate there is no function on earth it cannot provide to the average home user. What it isn’t capable of doing (without extra software) is remotely backing up machines on a schedule without all kinds of tweaking and mappings, it certainly can’t image the other machines, I could set up volume shadowing and so on too but it’s a big pain in the ass when you have so much content on the disks already. But all in all it serves the Home Server role pretty well already, but there are always more things I want to do to secure what is important to content for the household.

So when the announcement of Windows Home Server was made, it seemed like music to the ears. I lept on the beta signup and was accepted a week ago or so. In that time it has been installed, the media is moved there and what follows is a brief roundup of the great and the ugly of Beta 2 of Windows Home Server.

First the great:

Centralised Backup

The backup end of things in Windows Home Server is superb. Dumping everything onto one machine is nice, but could already be done on any other operating system. What makes it nice on WHS is a few things combining to provide a solution that just makes sense and is INCREDIBLY SIMPLE to set up.

• First there are no drive letters as far as the user is concerned. Every hard drive as it is added to the machine is simply formatted added to one large volume. Thus no more juggling space between partitions when things get tight. Once the storage is in place there are pre-shared folders for Video, Pictures, Music, Programs and so on, plus a share for each user on the network which can be made private if required. You can add additional shares should you need to but I haven’t needed any more than the pre-configured ones so far. So storage and sharing is managed very simply and I don’t think any more than 2-3 clicks of a mouse has been needed to set any of it up.
• Folder duplication is another great feature. Of the shares you can choose that any of them be duplicated backups meaning that there are two copies residing on different physical disks, so should one die on you the data is still available on another drive. Perfect for the really important stuff such as the user folders and the photos, whilst there is no need to use double the space for the TV shows and other replacable stuff.
• The next nice thing is the backup routines. Once a machine is added to the network (via installation of a very small 10mb piece of client software called the Connector) it’s backups can be managed totally within WHS. Every night a complete image is taken of the computer you can choose to exclude anything you don’t want and obvious things such as the page file, temp folder, hibernation file, are already excluded. This image can then be used to completely restore a PC like Ghost image, or be browsed to restore just a single file. It works flawlessly in both cases as I have tested and retested several times to feel secure the process will actually work! I even made a fresh installation image that included all the drivers for the various boxes around the house that could be used to rebuild any time I feel like.

Headless / Remote Management

WHS is designed to be a headless machine (i.e. no monitor, keyboard, mouse) and so after installation all that is connected to the box is a network cable and the power. Nice not to have even more cables adding to the copper jungle under the desk!

• All management of the server can be done using the WHS Console. This is a mini-remote desktop launched from any machine on the network that provides a very simple and intuitive interface to manage everything from new accounts, to adding extra hard drives. It is INCREDIBLY SIMPLE to use and even non-tecchies will come to grips with it in 5 minutes.
• You can also access the box of course over the internet using remote desktop (though this could be simpler to configure on the permissions side by launch as new users had to be added to a group outside of the console interface… I am sure its just a bug right now) so you can access the server wherever you are to grab important files, or maybe just listen to your music collection from work

Low System Requirements

The server runs on a stripped down version of SBS 2003 and thus the requirements are pretty low. The recommended (note not the mininum) requirements are a 1ghz processor and 512mb RAM. That means any old frankenstein machine can be thrown together from old parts and will run it perfectly. Some may find an old computer they consigned to the garage to gather dust may find a new lease of life running one of the most important functions of a home network!

So on the backup and setup side of things WHS is truly great. Very simple, very effective.

However, there are some things right now which would stop me buying it on release and some of them are insane.

The Ugly

First and most ridiculous is the fact that if you use the XBox 360 Media centre (I don’t just mean the video and music entries on the main blades, but the full blown media centre interface which is essential for us to use the digital TV features and program guide etc) you cannot access the Server’s shares. Crazy and one thing surely they have to fix. WHS should be the final piece of the end to end solution for the home media network and they have completely blunted the final step of it! What use is media if we can’t display it on the destination of choice which is within the fantastic Media Centre Extender interface of the 360 on the big screen?

Second (and related) is that due to the insane refusal of Microsoft to support DivX/Xvid formats through the 360, users have had to use realtime re-encoding solutions such as Runtime360 to view content in such formats through the 360. Now if you move the media to the WHS you would have to send the content across the network to the re-encoding box, and then again onto the 360. In something as bandwith intensive and dependent on throughput… this now seems impossible.
These two things alone would absolutely stop me from buying WHS and as almost everyone I know requires something similar, I would advise against it for them too. This could be easily fixed by Microsoft, implement DivX support on the 360, and make the shares extendable to media centre extenders…. voila!

Lesser issues (more like suggestions) are that roaming profile seem to be an obvious missing integration that would fit perfectly into the home network so that Dad can easily sit at his sons computer and everything he needs such as favourites and documents is just there waiting for him.
WHS is also REALLY missing a download manager. If WHS is to be sold as the replacement for that ‘always on’ machine, then users should be able to send a download link to the WHS to download and store so they can then switch their computer off. I think if they were bold and integrated a bittorrent client too, this could really be a killer sales pitch as right now there is still a need to have other machines switched on overnight guzzling electricity.

Conclusion

As it stands, WHS is a great backup product, but ultimately a crippled solution right now. I envisaged the WHS to be a solution to all those problems and to be the stand-alone resource for content and backup in the house. Right now the solution can be pulled off better by a single Windows Vista (in fact a single Windows XP machine), and similarly with open source solutions such as FreeNAS and various Linux Distros, though admittedly with more configuration required and some extra software. If they can just make media distribution to the living room a focus of future features and provide those little applications such as a download manager that would kill off the need for other PC’s to be left on overnight…. then they could have a real killer app on their hands. I understand they want to make the product simple but the problems and suggestions I have made would add little to the interface, yet add a bundle to the functionality.

I have shown three other people the box in action and they have asked the same three questions only to be dissapointed every time – DivX, Media Distribution, Download Manager…. Stop being so stubborn and get it done!

Related posts:

1. When Home Servers Go Tits-up!