Gavin’s Digital Diner

The retail release of Windows Home Server (WHS) hit the web- shops in early October. My copy arrived as fast as a flying monkey. The retail price was, as promised, less than $200 ($179 from NewEgg to be exact — a sweet deal considering what you’re getting).

It’s an “OEM” version, by the way; there’s no “consumer” version. It seems that most folks are expected to buy it pre-installed on a preconfigured “home server.” The OEM version in my grubby mitts is supposedly for “system builders,” folks that are going to bundle it with some hardware and sell it as retail turn-key system. Sure… That’s me. I am now officially a system builder. Wahoo! (ahem)

So far, the only downside to all this is, according to the shrink-wrap license, I’m my own end-user support. Apparently, the “system builder” is responsible for end-user support.

I bought it, I built it, and I sold it to myself. I must say, it was a great sales experience. I was very attentive to my needs and I seemed to know just what I wanted. Then again, when and if it comes to needing some support, I suppose I could just put myself on hold for an hour or two, ask a bunch of incomprehensible questions, cop an attitude, and then blame it on the “drivers.” That’s easy enough. “Have you tried rebooting, sir?” I’ll ask myself.

Anyway… The software’s arrival in the post just happened to correspond with a hardware sale at the local Stuff-R-Us Mega-Discount Warehouse and Croissant Emporium. They were clearing out half-terabyte hard drives — decent speed and cache — for 99 bucks. I was there and back before my credit card knew what happened.

New hardware in hand, software ready, I decided to start with a clean slate. I decided that it was time to chase the happily humming beta version, my lovely Frankenstein, out of town, like an angry villager armed with pitchfork and fire. Yep, Frankenstein, err… Fronkensteen had to go, and in its place: Son of Fronkensteen!

[See my previous Frankenstein-related posts "Savory Soho Server Soup" and "Dancing with Abby Normal." In those two posts I describe my adventures building a beta version of WHS, and then tweaking it a wee bit so that it would also run Windows SharePoint Services (WSS 3.0). ]

Sure, I could have gone the upgrade route, but I prefer a clean build. Windows, out of the box, is messy enough. Besides I had nice shiny new drives to work with. Besides, I wanted to do this right. In the next few weeks, we were going to build one of these for our London office — to provide an automated backup/shared file storage system — best to get off on the right foot.

I figured it was the perfect setup for an office of four people. Combined with (a soon-to-be-released WHS version of) JungleDisk, it would form the perfect disaster avoidance solution for a small office. WHS was brain-dead easy backup for local files and automated, off-site, secure backup (via JungleDisk and S3) of shared files. The remote access was gravy. And all for a great price.

• WHS would provide backup from local PCs to the WHS server.
• WHS would provide shared file storage between staff in the office.
• JungleDisk would automate the backup of the shared file storage to Amazon’s S3 service.
• When those folks travelled they could get remote access (via SSL) to their shared files.
• When and if we needed, my staff could get remote access to the local workstations via the built-in TS gateway service.

Building Son of Fronkensteen

So the process begins. With two new shiny drives in hand, I set out to build Fronkensteen Junior. First, I backed up everything on the Beta server – well, everything I wanted to save – on to a couple of USB drives.

Drives Akimbo

Then I tore Frankie (or is that Fronkie?) apart, removed all the existing drives, and shoved in the two new drives. I then added a dash of extra RAM I found lying around. Out of habit I checked the jumpers and cables, gave it a good vacuum, again checked the jumpers and cables; checked wallet, watch, testicles and spectacles, closed it up, and turned it on.

Everything worked and nothing hurt, so I booted from the WHS DVD and stared at the screen for about 45 minutes while drinking tea and playing with my dog, Tanzy. She likes this part of the process.

Seriously, that was it — stare at monitor, click “OK” once or twice, play with dog, and sip tea. Maybe I had to answer a couple of questions now and then, eventually, I had to type in the serial number. Other than that, it was just 45 minutes of daydreaming about Italy, Oaxaca, or dinner (I can’t remember which). After those 45 minutes — and after ignoring a variety of warnings about formatting drives, losing all your data, and possible nuclear meltdown — it was done. Fronkie Jr., was up and running.

Adding SharePoint

Tempting fate, I then followed my own instructions and installed Windows SharePoint Services on the server too — mucking about with the IIS ports and such. The second time around it was easy; in another 10 minutes it too, was done. It took three hours, start to finish, and that includes the vacuuming, daydreaming, several cups of tea, and some serious tennis ball tossing time with Tanzy.

[Tanzy would like me to note here that the tennis-ball-tossing is very serious work indeed, and she fails to understand why I waste my time with all these other trivial pursuits. "Ball," says Tanzy, dropping it in my lap, "Ball!" Obviously, I'm fairly dense, and can only follow simple instructions.]

WHS with SharePoint

— Embedded YouTube Video Experiment —

You can see SharePoint (above). This particular screen shot shows one of my current experiments —displaying a YouTube video inside of a SharePoint web part. Turns out it’s a piece of cake. It took about 10 minutes and a little work with SharePoint Designer. The evidence, above, is a screen-shot of a low-budget video by The Silencers performing a traditional Scottish ballad called “Wild Mountain Thyme,” AKA: the “Braes o’Balquidder” or the “Hills of Balquidder” (that’s “bal-whither,” should you care to pronounce it).

Music choice aside, the web part is simple. It’s just an IFrame as a link target, with a list of links on the same page. Put the links you want in a SharePoint list, display the list on the page, click on an item, and the content shows in the web part hosting the IFrame. You can use the same trick to create a dynamic “form library” of PDF forms, for example. Here’s an example, below:

Dynamic PDF Form Library Viewer

I can see using the embedded video parts for “how-to” videos and screen movies, on a central “how-to” page on an Intranet, for example. With a little creativity, SharePoint can rock, really.

All in all after an investment of three hours and a couple of hundred bucks, I had not only a multi-terabyte home server, but a serviceable SharePoint server too. For me, the SharePoint bit comes in handy for testing ideas about how to manage information, develop prototype intranet parts, and for experimenting with various MS Office integrations, such as OneNote.

[Lately I had been using OneNote (2007) for a variety of things, and it happily uses WSS as a central storage repository. Since I was considering using OneNote to help keep track and store a wild jumble of investment information (email, documents, charts, graphs, contracts, etc.), it was nice to be able to put it through its paces — OneNote takes some getting used to, I'll warn you now. But it basically will hold anything — and it likes to use SharePoint for its backend storage.]

Since it was all going well, I decided to customize things just a wee bit, modifying the wallpaper and the default remote web page (shown below) — paying homage to the original “Abby Normal” build, and getting rid of that irritating picture of a “family playing in the yard” that comes as the web site default. This is much more fitting.

Son of Fronkensteen. It’s alive, it’s alive!

Finally, I installed a couple of WHS Add-Ins: Avast for WHS  (beta 3 at this writing) and PhotoSync (beta 2 at this writing). Avast adds antivirus to the WHS server, and provides a management interface to any Avast clients installed on local PCs. It’s quite nice, and doesn’t seem as taxing to the system as, for example, Symantec’s AV products. Avast! for the home user is also free. That’s a great price. PhotoSync does what it says — it syncs photos. It automatically syncs designated WHS folders with a Flickr site. To add items to Flickr, you need only put them in a designated folder on the WSH shares. Filenames become picture titles on Flickr, and folder names become photo “sets” on Flickr — unfortunately there is no support for tagging, at least not yet.

WHS Console with Avast and PhotoSync

Fronkie Jr., is up and running, happily backing up my various PCs and laptops every night starting at 2:00 a.m., and busily syncing my photos with Flickr when I ask it to. It’s centrally managing Avast! Anti-virus across my home PC network, and has yet to terrorize any of the local villagers. What more could I ask?

Trackback URI | Comments RSS