Almost Free?
Having placed my order for a new 2009 Mac Pro, I have set myself (and my wife) a goal of making it pay for itself in 12 months.
For someone who has 40 hours a week to work on such a thing, that doesn’t seem like much of a challenge. But I have a full time job and a 10 month old son, so the most I will be able to give to such a project is at best a couple of hours a day! But I have a few angles to attack this on.
As always after a move of the site and a redesign I have been paying a little more attention to the stats than usual, as it’s pretty funny to see some of the stuff in there.
To give an idea of scale the site gets about 2500 visitors per day and so is by no means some great revelation in terms of user habits, but still some interesting stuff. continue reading »
Low power consumption doesn't mean low performance
So Windows Home Server is a chunk of code I have been very impressed with for a long time, even in Beta I trusted it completely and it has filled several needs in our house without a single hiccup. But the time came when I needed to run it on some decent and well considered hardware. continue reading »
Just wanted to point out an excellent guide on how to install WHS from a USB stick. Why on earth would someone want to do that? Well if you have bought any of the machines specifically designed for WHS you will likely find that they have no optical media drive as they are designed to be headless, quiet, never touched machines.
In my case I got the Tranquil PC T7 (review coming soon!) and used the option to buy without the WHS software as I already had a disk/license. Thus I needed a way to install WHS without buying an external DVD drive that I would only ever use once.
Some other manufacturers use a restore partition to get around the problem, but wouldn’t that space be better used for actual server storage? So owners of such machines may consider scrubbing that partition and adding it to the main WHS volume sets, and resinstalling WHS.
Anyway here is the guide, it’s crystal clear but if you need help just ask 
Heart Internet in a Nutshell
So yes, another new look and a new opportunity to rant. The rant this time is directed at my old webhost Heart Internet who have displayed some shocking customer service to add to 5 years of very mediocre service and thus finally pushed me to finding a far better host for less money!
So lets take the rants one by one: continue reading »
I have prepared a few things that are covered really badly the general review press recently that are close to fruition.
That lovely, big, cuddly, megacorp Microsoft is getting on my nerves recently. I am not one of those moron’s that hates Microsoft because I think it’s cool (though I could probably register high on many other moron measurements). I like a lot of Microsoft products, I have defended them in the past and I have praised them in the past. But these days they seem to have lost all coherence in some of their divisions.
I have bitched sometime long ago about the lack of content for all those poor people who have payed through the nose for a copy of Vista Ultimate (especially if they paid retail price… ouch!). For all those extra pennies paid for the ‘Ultimate’ version, what have they got in terms of value? A couple of very crappy games, video desktops, sound themes and disk encryption that about 0.0001% of the world might actually use.
But their latest loss of interest focuses it seems on Windows Home Server, which, as you might know I am in the process of resurrecting at home. Don’t get me wrong, the core product is superb. It runs on just about any old hardware thrown together, its backup and restore features cannot be beaten by any product on the market, and the remote RDP stuff is great.
But what could have been its crowning glory is the add-ins feature. They make it sound so simple! Drop in community written add-ins for extra functionality! Simply download to the \Software\add-ins directory and its ready to install in the WHS console. Yeah…. not so much!
I am yet to come across a useful add-in that doesn’t require some seriously hackery to install. For example, the add-in that probably 90% of users look for as soon as they get WHS is a torrent add-in. The most popular (in fact pretty much the ‘only’) is the uTorrent add-in. Let me give a brief synopsis of the installation procedure for that.
- Create a new admin account
- Download utorrent add-in
- Download Windows Resource Kit
- Download anyservice installer
- Download uTorrent
- Download uTorrent web gui
- Log on as your new admin account
- Install WRK
- Install uTorrent
- Configure uTorrent to use only ‘real’ paths instead of network WHS shares
- Extract and install the webgui
- Using a combination of WRK and the anyservice installer, create a custom service that runs uTorrent
- Configure service to run as the new admin user
- Registry hack for the service to run the correct .exe
- NOW you can drop your add-in into the folder and install it
- Finally spend several hours fixing permission issues and the like for the whole thing to actually work
This is actually one of the least technical installs! There are power saving add-ins that should be inbuilt functionality which require a combination of registry hacks and sysinternals to stop core processes from loading for christ’s sake!
The product has been out for a long time now and there are no ‘offical’ add-ins, the SDK is cursory at best. The problem here is that the product is SBS2003 with the appropriate apps hacked onto the top. But as I have said the apps hacked onto the top do a good job. The problem is that the add-ins are crippled by the fact this is SBS2003 with hacks, as there is absolutley no thought given to the under-the-hood framework needed to make this extendable. The apparent user friendliness (Microsoft’s supposed forte) of the WHS console is completely isolated to that part of the OS alone. Developers of add-ins are forced to hack their way through a mountain of unneccesary limitations and ‘should-have-been-removed’ remnants of the business product to get anything to work through an add-in.
Just look at that routine for installing the uTorrent add-in… how many steps would your parents or grandparents get through before throwing the thing out of the window?
OK, hopefully I am now back with a bitch bang. No really it’s a bitch and moan about Netgear drivers, but it’s also one of those rare situations where I can also offer a solution. continue reading »
Just an update for anyone wondering about the lack of activity… I am alive and have 3 articles/posts plus a review of some really outstanding headphones all ‘almost’ completed.
But having just moved house 4 weeks ago and the birth of our first child (a boy!) 3 weeks ago, I hope you all understand it’s family first right now and normal service will be resumed as soon as I get some … zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
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