Building a Windows Home Server Continued

Right well as you all know I set about the business of building a Windows Home Server from parts I ordered from the frankly great website Ebuyer (and no I’m not being paid to advertise them).
So to that end I’m sure you will all be thrilled to know the parts arrived on time which I was kind of thinking they wouldn’t but they did, and they all worked so no faffing about sending things back.
And surprisingly for someone who has never built a computer before it was all relatively straightforward the only real problem if you can call it a problem was attaching the heat sink to the motherboard and getting it to stay there, turns out it requires quite a bit of force which I was reluctant to use on delicate parts. Now I’m not going to detail the process of putting the computer together there are many websites out there doing that already, Google is your friend there. But what I will say is it all went smoothly.
Installing WHS
This again went without a hitch, I downloaded the trail of the Microsoft website burnt the .ISO file with ImgBurn, bashed it in the DVD drive and installation started. After that was done (and it does take longer than installing XP or Vista) I got myself familiar with the Home Server Console, pretty simple stuff. Installed UTorrent and HFS-a file hosting program and set about well you know, setting it up.
First of all I set a torrent going, pretty smooth there, my router is a bitch and I’ve only ever managed to forward one port so I had to turn off UTorrent on my other pc otherwise it wouldn’t work quite right-that was all fine and dandy,
HFS was another beast. Getting to grips with the actual program itself was pretty straight forward, what was not however was the forwarding of ports so that it can be accessed over the internet, like I said my router is a bitch and after literally hours of trying, I gave up. But what I can say is that a friend has a server set up with this on that works really quite well, here’s a link http://92.19.151.224/
But for me it wasn’t to be, no matter I told myself, the backup features will more than pay for themselves.
WHS backup features were as advertised a breeze to set up, scheduled backups and all that jazz, but what I wanted to do was test the backup function so I bashed the ‘Backup Now’ button and low and behold it started backing up BUT and this is a big but I have about 500GB of data to backup over a network and you know with two different OS’s and what not so I expected it to be quite slow but honestly it was painful and to do this every week or every day? Out of the question it really was the strain it put on my network slowed other things down to a crawl AND to top it off at about 79% it FAILED yes failed, saying that it could not read the source disk. So I was thoroughly pissed off. And decided at that moment that WHS was not for me. (Also the drivers for my MoBo were for XP/Vista and so did not work which meant I could not run UT2004 and run a game server as my graphics were not being recognised)
So long story short I ditched WHS and bashed Windows Vista Ultimate on it, which by the way runs very smoothly. I can now do a manual backup to up still takes ages and frankly is not for me, but now at least I have a useable pc as well.
Oh and even with Vista on it, I decided I did not need a second pc and its now on Ebay, hopefully going to sell, I put it on at the price I paid for the parts and hopefully someone else can make better use of it than me.

Hope I haven’t put you off...lol

-GingerFox

A wonderful comment by GingerFox to his friend Trilby

(drawing a hand on paint)

Trilby: it makes it look more textured
GingerFox: if by textured you mean has shit on his hands yes.
Trilby *undo*

Building A Windows Home Server

Yes you read the title correctly I am endeavouring to build a server that will be running the newish windows home server OS.
Now a few of you out there, even self professed tech heads may be wondering what WHS is; I for one a few months ago did not know what it was. Well to cut a long story short after a lot of googling and installing in virtual pc software, I now understand/know what WHS is.

Bassically it is server software that has been not watered down but simplified and streamlined for the home market. So to this end it backs up all the computers that are connected to it (up to a maximum of 10) allows streaming of media and is compatible with the xbox 360 with its media extender, it also alows for shared storage space and individual log-ons so that files can be shared on the server but only one or a select group of people can access the files. Lastly files can be down and uploaded from anywhere in the world via the wonders of the internet, provided its turned on of course. (I say lastly but of course it has many other features, just there the main ones)

The main draw of building one of these as i imagine it is for most people is the backup fuction, as not only is it a pain in the preverbial backside reinstalling an OS and doing all the things that come with that. But many files simply cannot be replaced. Also even if you don't want a complete image backup of your computer like the server does (more on that later) I for example have 500GB of media files on my computer that i would like a second copy of for safe keeping and for streaming, so this is a big plus.

So sounds like a good idea? I thought so, which is why im building me a server. There are for the less technically minded and richer people amongst us prebuilt options, the most mainstream at the moment being the HP mediasmart. However i ordered parts for my server so i could put them together myself, (this method will save you hundreds of pounds-just a heads up)

Here's what i bought from http://www.ebuyer.com

• MSI G31M3-F iG31 Socket 775 onboard graphics 8 channel audio mATX Motherboard
• Intel Celeron Dual Core E1400 2GHz (800MHz) Socket 775 512KB L2 Cache Retail Boxed Processor
• Extra Value 2GB DDR2 667MHz Value Memory Non ECC Unbuffered
• Coolermaster 460W eXtreme Power Plus PSU - 20+4pin 4+4 ATX12v 4x SATA 6pin PCI-E
• Hitachi DeskStar 1TB Hard Drive SATAII 7200rpm 16MB Cache - OEM (I bought 2 of these)
  
• LiteOn 20x DVD±RW Dual Layer & Ram SATA Black Bare Drive - OEM
• Casecom KB-7760 Black ATX Midi Tower Case - No PSU, No Case Fans Included

Now all of this plus a few SATA cables i bought off ebay came to around £303 which is in my opinion very good value for money, try getting that in a shop- i double dare you.
This spec is above and beyond what is recomened to run WHS (1GHZ P3 or equivilant, 512mb Ram 80GB HDD) you might wonder as to why i bought such 'high' specced parts, well i wanted it to be future proofed-at least for a bit. I guesstimated that it would run Vista quite well so anything else should be a simple.

Right well these parts haven't actually arrived yet, but when they do and it's assembled, i shall finish this post and let you know the outcome.


-GingerFox

This is not really helpful but...

I know i am attempting to center this blog around helpfulness in the tech world, and for not posting much i apolgise, but in the mean time go onto google image search and search 'lol cat' unless you are missing your humor or you have a heart of stone these will make you chuckle, go on, what are you waiting for?


-GingerFox