In a word. Absolutely.

This is a first of a series of posts I’m planning on doing that describes how my WHS, Media Library and home is setup.

I’ve been meaning to revise my media streaming capabilities of my WHS for a while now, and with a significant amount of DVD’s ripped for use with Windows 7 Media Centre, I wanted to find a way in which these could also be used remotely via an XBox 360 (in addition to the other numerous formats I’ve now got, including HD Content as MKV’s).

So I never really got TVersity running smoothly, lots of video types simply didn’t work, transcoding never worked effectively and I was getting a little disillusioned. Basically apart from the core types of files, all of my other content was only usable in the office (or other Win 7 machines dotted around the house).

So last night, I started to hunt around with the view of changing my streaming solution to the house. Hidden deep within a WHS Forum on Media Streaming, I saw PS3MS mentioned.

So off I went with for a little digging…and came to the conclusion pretty darn quickly that it needed to be given a go.

Download was small (17Mb or so) and and install was quick. As it’s Java based it automatically pulled down the JRE as part of the install as well. Once complete, I then clicked run, added my WHS Media Shares, click Save and powered up the 360.

And this is where I then sat agape at my screen watching everything I threw at the 360 (via the Video Library option) render and play perfectly with no intervention from me. No codecs, no configuration, nothing. It just worked.

Even 720P MKV files were rendered in their full glory with no issue. Even more impressive was it was running and streaming all of this happily via a wireless adapter and the server was happily running along at around 50-60% CPU utilisation.

The icing on the cake was DVD ISO Transcoding. This remarkable piece of software, again with no tweaking, will automatically read a VIDEO_TS folder and create virtual video files of all of the titles on a ripped DVD which you can then play.

Every piece of video content I now have on my WHS (and there’s in excess of 300Gb’s worth) is now fully watchable remotely via my 360.

And it’s free. Really is a no brainer…

PS3 Media Centre’s main site is here and the official forum is here. If you stream, or want to stream content, to your 360 (or PS3), I highly recommend you give it a go.

Now I have one proviso, I haven’t managed Audio quite as impressively as Video as it seems to want all music files in the same folder. I’ve got almost 30Gb’s of music so this isn’t going to happen. Will be working through this little issue shortly as I’m sure there’s away around it.

With my corporate laptop dying on me again last week, I needed a reimage. This was then duly performed by IT Support at work. The first thing on my to do list when I booted it at home was to add it to my WHS for backup purposes.

However this didn’t quite work as expected. At the end of the Connector install, I got an error stating I already had 10 computers connected to my WHS and that to add this one, I’d need to remove one. Unfortunately removing a computer from WHS also removes ALL previous backup images of said computer as well.

Now I don’t have 10 computers in the house (more like 5) however the other computers are old images of reimaged computers (my vista x64 image of my desktop now running Windows 7 for example). The problem is I *do* was to keep these at least short to mid term just in case there’s files/resources that I’ve not yet needed or restored from them.

And anyways, I was adding the SAME machine twice, with the same computer name, the same licence key etc. Why was it looking to add it as a totally new machine?

Well the answer and solution is relatively simple thankfully. Scouring the forums, there was a general annoyance at this ‘feature’ as it was causing a lot of inconvenience to everyone, especially to people who like me, prefers to reimage their machine periodically to ensure optimal performance.

Luckily the fix is simply a registry tweak: -

From the looks of it, the first time the WHS Connector software is attempted to be installed onto a desktop it creates a registry key in

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows Home Server

Within this newly created key it assigns a GUID to this machine (in the “value” called GUID ironically enough).

On the WHS, each computer is tracked by its GUID. These are again listed and managed by a registry key: -

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows Home Server\Transport\clients

Within this section there is a number of registry key entries, one for each of the computers managed by the WHS. If you then look at each of the keys, you’ll see the values against it show full details of each of your computers (the computer name, the Model etc).

So the fix is simple. Locate the entry under ‘Clients’ that represents the computer you’ve recently reimaged. Head back onto the computer you’re trying to add and replace the GUID registry value with this value from the WHS and reinstall the WHS Connector software.

This will then simply merge this new computer back into the existing computer account it has on the WHS as opposed to attempting to create a new one.

So I’ve advocated just how great Windows Home Server is many times. It’s also saved my bacon, from a backup perspective on more than one occasion.

One of the great aspects of a WHS is the ability to develop add-ins for the WHS Console. I have a number installed which extend the functionality of WHS signifcantly (the integration into Amazon’s S3 service via the Jungle Disk WHS Add-in for automatic offline storage is one for example that I rely upon greatly).

A new add-in has just been released that allows your Home Server to ‘tweet’ its Health status via Twitter. By following my WHS’s Twitter account, I can now monitor the home Server and network health irrespective of where I am.

Such a great idea and given that the alerts themselves are totally extendable, this means, add-ins, when coded correctly can alert their users of almost any issue irrespective of where they are.

My home server’s twitter account is RedDogWHS if anyone’s interested in knowing how healthy my current server and network is (although I have protected them).

You can download the WHSTweet add-in from the Home Server hacks page.

So I’ve always been a fan of Media Centre and although I’ve never really used it to its full potential (never had Live TV through it) I have used it sporadically on both my old Vista machine and via my 360 acting as an extender. What's stopped me from really moving to it full time, from a media playback perspective, was it’s lack of support of other 3rd party codecs (DivX, XVid etc).

However, whilst playing with Windows 7 over the last few days, I noticed something that didn’t really hit me until now.

Windows 7 out of the box now seems to support DivX and XVid formats (amongst others). All content I have on my WHS was fully playable in Windows 7 without installing ANY codecs. These formats are now able to also be able to played back in Media Centre (as opposed to Media Player).

Tonight, I’ve finally got a little time to connect my 360 to Windows 7 as a Media Extender and amazingly, all codecs can now also be played back via the Extender. I don’t believe this was ever possible prior to connecting to a Win 7 Media Centre and in addition the UI of the extender now reflects the Windows 7 UI (so I suspect the recent NXE update to the 360 also enabled it to also receive updates to the Media Centre Extender client).

All good news and another step towards me having a fully integrated Media solution at home. All I need now is for the next version of Windows Home Server (which will be based on the Windows Server 2008 R2/Windows 7 architecture) to also include Media Centre so I don’t need to keep two machines on constantly to serve media.

Now, I should know better. Being an Architect of Enterprise Scale applications (millions of transactions, hundreds of thousands of messages a day and database tables the size you’ve never seen), I should know and preach the power of more memory.

However, I, for some crazy reason, have ignored my own instincts for a long time with respect to my own Home Server.

“It’s only storing my Audio and Video and running backups. Microsoft clearly calls out 512Mb as the recommended memory for a ‘typical’ WHS” I kept thinking. So why bother upgrading?

Well two things changed my mind: -

1. I demonstrated remote access to a colleague the other day and viewing WebGuide was really really slow
2. My WHS over the last few weeks has started to become a little more of a work horse, with some new planned blogs and sites running on it while in their design stage (resulting in both mySQL and SQL Server being required…)

So Friday just gone, I ordered 2Gb of memory online to add to the already paltry 512Mb. It arrived this morning so having just put it in, I booted the server up.

One area where performance has increased exponentially is with the Remote Console (a very cleverly disguised Remote Desktop Session). Prior to this, performance was only adequate (even before I added RDBMS’s to it). However the UI now absolutely flies with switching between the difference ‘tabs’ being almost instantaneous.

With more and more add-ins coming out for WHS, I suspect a great many people with experience the same degrading performance as they add more and more functionality to the server without being aware that simply adding more RAM will speed it up.

However, one challenge here is the fixed Sku’s of certain WHS’s (unless you build your own like I did). The HP Media Smart range of servers for instance, has no official way as yet to upgrade memory so doing so invariably invalidates your warranty. I believe they are aware of this concern though and are currently preparing an upgrade path for customers.

As a final thought, I should have done this six months ago. Knowing Windows as well as I do, I also know Windows ‘loves’ as much memory as you throw at it so if you think, or even suspect, your server/desktop is swapping to disk often, upgrade the RAM, the difference will be like night and day.

On that note, I sourced my memory from Orca in the UK. The memory was shipped within 45 minutes of me ordering it online on Friday and arrived here in Ireland on the Monday. Can’t ask for more than that.

So, I've been using WHS now since the beginning of the year and as with my previous posts on WHS, everything just 'works'.

I haven't experienced any issues and overall my network, numerous PC's and overall data storage are in a far better state than they ever were.

With the release of Power Pack 1 (and the fix for the data corruption bug), my entire photo gallery is now held natively on the server with Windows Photo Gallery accessing this directly (management of Tags, ratings etc). Prior to PP1, this was something that was risky if you had multiple drives and because of this,the photo's, until recently were stored locally on my main Vista desktop.

One aspect of my new regime that hadn't as yet been truly investigated was online backup (no real reason, just simply not enough time). However, after looking at the storage the other day, I had to be honest with myself and admit that some of that data is truly critical and irreplaceable (the 19Gb of photo's is high on that list believe me).

Yes, I duplicate everything at the moment over at least 2 disks (as I have the space) but there's still that risk of catastrophic failure. There's over 6 years of photo's there and losing them would be heartbreaking.

So I've finally taken the plunge and opted to add into my backup strategy an online portion.

One aspect that was important is obviously integration with WHS as this will always be my primary backup and storage source for all of the data held in the house.

My approach is pretty straight forward: -

• Use WHS Backup's as my primary backup strategy (and why not? As it just works *so* well)
• Use the WHS shares (with all important data duplicated over two drives) as my main storage for public and common files used by everyone in the household (Music, Photo's, Video's, Shared docs etc)
• Compliment this with off-site storage for all absolutely critical content and files on the WHS that I cannot be without in the event of having to 'start again'

This approach will give a pretty consistent approach in the unlucky event of a failure/catastrophe:-

• In the event of a Media failure (a hard disk in the WHS), remove the failed disk and replace. Absolutely no 'downtime' and all files are always available
• In the event of a desktop/laptop failure (HDD, O/S corruption etc), restore from a WHS restoration image
• In the event of a serious catastrophe, all files I can't easily obtain again will be stored offsite and can easily be restored once the WHS is back up and running again

After looking around at a number of options, I've decided to use Amazon's S3 service and Jungle Disk's WHS add-on to manage this aspect.

One of the advantages (or disadvantages depending on how the S3 service is used) is that it's not fixed price (but then it doesn't have any data limits either), and you only pay for the storage you use.

Given my strategy (restoration from offsite storage is absolutely last resort and only for critical content I can't easily re-obtain/recreate) this approach will actually me cost pretty much next to nothing on a month by month basis and will grow and scale as I need in the future.

Had I chosen to use Jungle Disk on my desktop's as my main primary backup strategy, my usage and thus cost, would I'm sure be more significant (as you do also pay for 'requests' for the data as well as putting data in and out). However, with the strategy above, I estimate storing all of my essential content will only cost me between €2-€3.50/month

So I suppose a lot of you would be asking, well this is never going to happen to me, so why do I need to backup my data so securely? Unsurprisingly as we all know, PC's are being used more and more. But then surprisingly, the absolutely lack of awareness to the importance of backups really still passes most people by.

However it DOES happen; A family member for instance, recently had GCSE grades lower than expected due to losing all of their coursework on the family computer. My good friend (Paul Hammond) came back from holiday to find his hard disks had failed. It happens. Period.

Now saying the above, I've luckily never, in all the time I've been in IT, experienced a Hard Drive failure or serious data loss. However, I've seen it happen to too many people I know and I for one, am now glad that I've finally put in place the final element to ensure I'm protected.

For all you WHS users out there, the long awaited update (PowerPack 1) has RTM'd and can now be downloaded from Microsoft's Download centre (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=1A6AEF46-DB57-401F-814F-6EFA26E7A1E8&displaylang=en).

This brings a number of advantages as well as fixing the Data Corruption bug when using applications to write data directly to the WHS Shares if multiple drives are connected.

This update also brings with it full x64 support so I can finally remove Vista's backup for my Vista Ultimate x64 install and have the machine backed up like all of my other x32 clients.

Although I'm a fan of Vista's SideBar, there's not *that* many gadgets that I regard as unable to live without.

However, Donavon West has just released what must be the most useful gadget for users of Windows Home Server.

His ShareMaster gadget (now compatible with x64 versions of Vista without the WHS Connector S/W installed as well) is a dream.

The gadget simply shows 6 icons that represent the main shares exposed by WHS like so: -

Clicking the icon obviously opens an explorer window at that location, but the real beauty is simply the ability to drag a file/folder onto the icon to copy it to that WHS location.

This saves a huge amount of time (open windows, mouse clicks etc) when managing the content between your workstations and the WHS.

It has become a standard gadget now on all of my vista machines.

Check out the gadget at

http://www.homeserverhacks.com/2008/04/sharemaster-for-home-server-gadget.html

So I've been using WHS now for a number of months now and overall am very impressed with the overall package.

One aspect I hadn't really used (or setup) was the Remote Access features and links to xxxx.homerserver.com.

No real reason tbh, just hadn't the inclination or time to fully investigate it. Well with potentially more travel in the coming months, having the ability to have access to my files and all music while on go is getting a little more attractive.

Unfortunately, my ISP (the disadvantage of living rurally is you have very little choice to your ISP especially when ADSL is not available in your village!), won't allow me access to my router's configuration to enable UPnP (which WHS needs to so it can configure port forwarding).

However after a little investigation they will configure it for you. So yesterday I pushed an email off them asking them to open ports 80, 443, 444 (streaming) and 4125 (Remote Desktop) and forward it onto my WHS on my internal network).

30 minutes later, all is changed, I check my xxxx.homeserver.com domain and viola! All is working. I now have access to my entire internal network via a pretty efficient web based UI if required. I can even run the WHS Console remotely so if need be I can kick off backup's, check storage etc.

I've also added the WebGuide WHS Add-in that will stream your content (video or music) to an external client.

All in all, my setup it pretty set now, except for the ever growing need of more storage. My DVD collection I've put onto the server is starting to highlight the real need for more drives...

As a family of fairly heavy users of computers at home (2 desktops, 3 laptops), I was always very aware of the risk present with lots of data on all of the machines.

So, when WHS was announced I started to keep a closer eye on the technology and how it was developing.

As a promise to myself this year, I assured 'me', I'd sort out the backup strategy and media streaming capabilities of the house (to both the 360 in the 2nd living room and the main TV/Stereo in the main one).

So in January I jumped onboard and installed WHS onto a Xeon based Dell PowerEdge server I had 'lying' around doing nothing.

Have been using WHS for about a month now so thought I'd share my views on it.

Well, it just 'works'. There's nothing more to say. The integration onto the desktop is excellent, the backup engine again is just so well put together there's never an issue. I've created a backup window every evening and the systems just backup one at a time during this time with no issues. WHS will even push a Wake Up over LAN message to them if they're hibernated or asleep.

Overall, the product has changed my setup here for the better (and yes, granted I could have performed most of the functionality by simply reusing the current version of Win2K3 that was on the server and tweaking my own processes). But items that need to be called out as serious enhancements are: -

• The Drive Extender technology (never worry about a drive running out of space again)
• Backup Engine is flawless and quick (which is a marked difference to the Vista backup engine!)
• The Remote Connection capabilities via xxxx.homeserver.com)
• The Console (even though based on a Remote Desktop Connection) is a great tool centralising all aspects of the WHS and the add-in functionality is great.

But there's a but. There's currently a known issue with the Drive Extender technology that means any 'write' to a WHS share from specific applications from any computer that's not the Server may result in data corruption.

This is being worked on as a top priority by MS and a fix is slated for release in June(!). So until then WHS does lose a little of its flair but, enough for me to remove WHS (like lot of people are saying they will) and revert back to my old ways??

No way.