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Archive for December, 2009

How Windows Home Server made my life easier

Monday, December 7th, 2009


Like most good geeks, I like to experiment with new technology at home. I have a pretty intricate home network and enjoy adding new things to it and playing with new products. My partner, who also has to share this house, however does not. She doesn’t appreciate it when her files get moved about to accommodate my new SAN, or she has to run some other program to backup her laptop, or has to change the way she gets films off the network and onto the TV.

My partners a teacher and so has limited requirements for the home network – backup her files, let her get on the internet and be able to stream media to the TV, preferably without her having to think about it. I needed something that would do this that would remain constant and let her get on with her stuff, so she doesn’t need to get annoyed with me.

Yes, I could have put together a complicated solution using Windows Server, maybe some sort of network backup, or Acronis solution etc but I thought I’d first take a look at Windows Home Server, which should do everything I need for me. So I setup a new VM, and set it installing. I was dubious at first, there’s been a lot of negative press about WHS, however once it was installed it took me about half an hour to get it configured and start backing up the home machines.

I’m impressed with WHS, it’s primary function of backing up the home PC’s works great, it’ll bring machines out of sleep at night, run a backup and put them back to sleep. I had an occasion a few weeks ago where I needed to restore, I just burned a restore boot CD, booted the PC and connected it to the home server and ran the restore, an hour later the image was restore and the PC was back to normal.

The plugin architecture for WHS is one if its best features. You can get plugins that will do most things you need on your home network. I’m using PS3 Media Server to stream to my PS3, the inbuilt media server will stream using DLNA, however the PS3 won’t play all codecs, so the PS3 plugin encodes the files on the fly so they’ll play properly. I’m using a Jungledisk plugin to ensure all my data is backed up offsite to Amazon S3, the twitter plugin to notify me of any network problems and there are many more plugins i’m going to be looking at.

The biggest benefit of WHS is that it just works. I can just leave it running, assured that backups are working, and it will tell me if there is a problem. It deals with sharing all our files we need on the network and media streaming and so I can just forget about it, and get on with testing Exchange 2010, without disturbing anyone else’s work.

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Sysadvent – The advent calendar for sysadmins

Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009


If you’ve not heard about it before, sysadvent is an advent calendar for sysadmins. Each day in December you will find a tasty new blog post to help you on your way to Christmas. The articles cover an array of topics, if you look at last years they range from Powershell to Puppet. Take a look, they might not all be in the area your working in, but they will all be interesting.

The reason that I’m writing about this is not only because it’s a great idea, is that I’m going to be contributing some posts this year, so look out for some potential topics of Active Directory Naming, Exchange 2010 and Linux for Windows Admins.

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