Rob's Blog

A few months ago, I bought myself a Buffalo LinkStation Pro to store all of my home files. Now, whilst this box functions very well as a standalone NAS box, there are some frustrations with it – especially the fact that I can’t stream music and videos directly from it to my Xbox 360. So, when Microsoft announced Windows Home Server, designed specifically to act as the media centre for a home I thought "great!" Now I’ve been invided to the beta, I had a go at getting it up and running…

Unfortunately, I no longer have any spare hardware knocking around my house, so I had to install this on my laptop in an instance of Virtual PC – not ideal. The pre-release version requires 512Mb of RAM to install, which seems somewhat excessive to me. I allocated 384Mbs and setup refused to continue, so I bumped it up to the requirements. The install went smoothly, if slowly; the server initially boots into the GUI portion of Windows Setup, much like Vista – a departure from other versions of Windows Server 2003, which Home Server is built upon. In fact, when the system reboots and goes through text-mode setup (yes, I was a bit surprised by that too – the install goes into the GUI, asks for all the info, continues for a bit and then hops back into text mode to copy the files), the headline says "Windows Server 2003 Small Business Edition" – much like Media Center 2005 says it’s Windows XP Professional.

The setup is certainly straightforward; however it’s important to note that most people purchasing Windows Home Server will either be techies, more than capable of installing an OS on their hardware, or buying an all-in-one box with the OS pre-installed. Given the number of reboots needed (I didn’t count, but it was lots) during the setup, I’d probably want to buy it on a pre-configured box.

Anyway, setup finally finishes (it took a pretty long time installing into a virtual machine on my laptop) and you’re taken through the initial screens. First of all you’re asked to pick a strong password and a password hint, much like the initial setup of Windows XP. Following choosing a password you’re prompted to confirm you want to send usage and error logs to Microsoft – I chose to accept this (Microsoft were kind enough to invite me onto their beta so the least I can do is provide them with feedback) but on a live system I’m not sure I will.

Upon logging on, you’re presented with a nice note – "You are logged on to the Windows Home Server desktop. Many standard Windows Server administration tools available from this desktop can break Windows Home Server." Now, it could just be me, but, hey Microsoft, why not just not install these in the first place? Looking around the installation, setup had automatically created a 10Gb "SYS" partition, of which 3.7Gb was used. 3.7Gb? An absolutely enormous amount of space. I really hope Microsoft bring this down in the final release – it’s clear that, as things stand, Windows Home Server is a standard Windows Server 2003 install with some extra bits and pieces bolted on.

Before setting up my server, I thought I’d have a look at what was actually installed on my system by running the original Windows Setup to add/remove Windows components. Not much to note here, except that IIS is installed. What was curious though is the ability to add things like Windows Deployment Services, Windows Media Services and Certificate Services. I’m sure this is just as a consequence of being built on a standard Windows Server, but it would be interesting if you could use Windows Deployment Services to roll out new home PCs when you bought them, or to save an image of your current PC for deployment to a new one.

So, that’s what’s installed then. Great! Now to play with the product itself…