Going forward with the Home Server...

As mentioned several times before, I upgraded from Windows Home Server Version 1 to WHS 2011 some time ago. Since then I have experienced absolutely no critical problems, and generally it runs solidly for months on end. It's fair to say that the server doesn't come under much load, but even so I'm very happy with it.

The biggest issue I have had is with the server backup drive (the drive to which the server itself backs up to) filling up. This seems to be a bit of an oversight as the clean-up process seemed flaky, but even this has settled down now I've tweaked a few settings, although it's anyones guess if I now have a below par server back-up running, but I think it's fine for my use case.

Overall WHS2011 works well for me, and since the latest roll-up pack appears to have addressed compatibility with the forthcoming Windows 8 machines, I have no urgent requirement to upgrade to the WHS2011 replacements for the moment, but it's always worth keeping one ear to the ground.

Recently Paul Thurrott has comment on the transition to the next wave of servers on his A Tale Of Two Home Office Servers post, and his thinking is similar to mine, although he does come from a slightly different perspective.

Essentially the choice appears to be purchasing Windows Server 2012 Essentials at around $450, or running a Windows 8 client.

The current price of Windows Server 2012 Essentials removes this from my choices for the moment, at least until it drops to $150, possibly less. WHS2011 dropped to a very good price, but then this was a more specialised product. Windows Server 2012 Essentials is a higher end product, so I don't expect a similar price drop will happen.

Similarly using Windows 8 Pro, whilst it could offer advantages such as providing that always on media center so many of us had been hoping would be in WHS2011, will fall down on the vital area of remote access and automated PC Backups (the killer WHS feature for me) as far as I am aware. This will make it a step back in ways that are important to me.

Since I splashed out for the marvelous DrivePool, I'm not overly concerned about Storage Spaces at the moment so that's not a driver to an update either.

So I guess it's going to be a case of sitting tight and waiting to see what happens. As long as Windows 8 machines work with the current system I'm in no particular hurry. I guess it's going to be a case of "If it ain't broke, don't fix it". I guess my backup server is a rare case where I don't actually feel the need to have the latest shiny...

Still, I know what I'm like, so that will probably change soon.

XBox Music

Some time ago, Spotify offered a free 6 month (it may have been three, my memory fails me a little) trial of their "Premium" service. I had never been interested before for two main reasons, firstly I'm from an age where I own thousands of CDs and Records (yes, vinyl), so I like to keep stuff after I've paid for it. Secondly, I listen to music mainly through my mobile these days. The long sessions of listening to music in the evenings of years gone by have been largely replaced with other media (video or games). My music primarily takes place when I'm travelling or working (which still accounts for many hours in an average day).

With all this in mind the ability to play music on my mobile appealed, so I signed up for the trial. I did use this a few times, but due to having a lot going on at that time, not as much as I expected.

Then after one month, my free trial finished.

WTF?

The upshot was that I didn't have enough time to see the benefits, and I was a little upset by the premature expiration. No sale Spotify.

I went back to buying CDs, and the occasional MP3.

However, being a Windows Phone user, I'd always been vaguely intrigued by the concept of the Zune Music Pass, but not enough to actually do anything about it.

Recent talk by Paul Thurrott on Windows Weekly and the Win Super Site reminded me of this service recently however. To cut a long story a bit shorter, I mentioned the Zume music service to a work friend (who also has a Windows Phone), and as an ex-user of the service before having a Windows Phone, he re-signed that night. The following morning he showed me the service working on his mobile, and I'm interested enough to have now signed up to the 14 day trial.

We'll see how it goes, so far I'm impressed how slick it all is... although as I already mentioned it's hard for an old git like me to grasp the concept of not physically own things (despite being an occasional user of Love Film Instant).

I may well end up getting the monthly subscription until Windows 8 (and the built in integrated music apps) become my primary OS, by which time I would have either lost interest or will decide to go for the yearly subscription. I wonder what it will be called by then?

Of course, this may also have a small effect on my thoughts of the announced Lumia 920 not having an SD card... to a minor extent (although I'm still not impressed by that decision).

Looks like I'm in real danger of being fully sucked into the Microsoft ecosystem.... but at least I'm doing this knowingly and with the knowledge that alternatives are available, and trust me when I say that Microsoft must continue to deliver the goods to keep me sucking at the teat.

Oh, and unlike Spotify, Zune doesn't seem to broadcast everything I listen to, to all my "friends" on Facebook.

Any downsides? Well, the only one so far is possibly the 3 device download limit, although thinking more about this it should be enough with the addition of unlimited web streaming. Initially I thought about downloading to my home PC, but why bother when it's always connected? If any other down sides pop-up(?!!) I'll let you know.

Shame the downloads "to purchase and keep" are so damn expensive though.

Nokia Lumia 920 First Impressions

So, after eagerly awaiting the Nokia event in New York for the last couple of weeks it's finally all over.

I currently use a Nokia Lumia 800, I love the Windows Phone 7.5 OS (although I'm painfully aware of some of it's limitations), and was hoping to see a raft of features on offer that would have me taking a hammer to the piggy bank.

The hammer, I'm sad to say, is staying in the garage for a while.

The Lumia 920 is indeed an excellent looking phone, and from as much as we've been told ticks most, if not all, of the boxes for me. Except one.

Whilst Windows Phone 8 (re)introduces support for SD cards, and there is an MicroSD card slot on the mid-range Lumia 820, this is sadly lacking on the 920.

Why?

Don't get me wrong, the 32Gb of on-board memory is quite good, but I fear on a phone that I hope to keep using for at least two years this will get filled up pretty quickly.

I've had the Lumia 800 since early this year and I'm already at the stage where purchased applications take up the lions share of internal memory, leaving me limited space for music and movies. I regularly see a "not enough space" message when updating the libraries for the following day. This is a situation I can only see getting worse with the new applications that will begin to appear.

Sure, the Lumia 920 features double the memory of my Lumia 800, but it's still not enough, especially considering that the new screen is begging to be used to view movies.

So 32Gb of memory will lead to compromises, whilst 32Gb with a MicroSD slot and a card of 64Gb (or possibly higher in the future?) giving 96Gb of space would lead to... well, fewer compromises (yes I really do have that much music, and it's not always possible/practical to stream music).

So the Lumia 920 is still in the running, especially if the Nokia software bundle is as strong as it has been on the current models, but this one seemingly simple omission has got me considering alternatives. It's not the no-brainer I was hoping it would be.

I wonder how that Samsung Ativ S will turn out...

Back from the dead?

This morning I was reading the post Your Words Are Wasted on the excellent blog area of Scott Hanselman's Computer Zen site, and I realised that I've not posted anything to this blog in over a year, and this is probably something I should sort out.

It's not the first time one of my many sites have been in this position, and I doubt it will be the last, but let's have another crack at keeping it going this time (as in having regular updates).

I have actually written several posts since the last time I updated here, however due to various reasons they never made it to the site. Perhaps a couple of them could be salvaged.

Either way, I'll try (once again) to keep this site ticking over. Apologies if you find the content pointless, please don't flame me, just don't waste your time here if that is the case, however if you do see something of interest, that I've mis-understood or got wrong, or have any other constructive comment, please feel free to comment or contact me.

Thanks,

Stu.

WHS 2011: So How Did It Go?

Further to my previous post, I took receipt of four 2 terabyte drives and two 2 gigabyte memory sticks on Thursday 28th July, then the server arrived on Friday 29th. Needless to say I rushed home and started to put the new machine together.

First things first, I unpacked the server, plugged in the relevant leads and powered up to ensure everything was working correctly (or at least appeared to be), and took a note of the BIOS revision number. I then went onto the HP web site, downloaded the latest BIOS, run the executable to create the update files on a USB stick, and proceeded to update the server BIOS. All good.

Next step was to replace the memory and hard drives with my larger capacity components. All good. I jumped into the BIOS, changed the drive type to RAID, then entered the RAID set-up, and created two logical arrays of two striped drives. Splendid!

Now I was ready to install Windows Home Server 2011 itself. My USB stick with the files on refused to boot, so I grabbed my external USB DVD drive and fired things off... and the install went smoothly, recognising my two 4TB logical disks and installing to the first without issue.......... right up until the closing stages. Arses!

No matter what I tried the installer kept throwing a problem accessing the X: drive.

I used the Microsoft tool to create Windows 7 bootable USB key, but even attempting to install this way failed with the same error.

A search on the internet revealed people had found solutions to this issue blaming things such as broken hard drives, damaged media, and interestingly a timing issue using external drives. I hadn't even bothered installing an internal optical drive, I've got spares but they were all IDE, the new machine only supports SATA. Still, it was worth a punt so a trip to PC World resulted with me returning with a Blu-Ray writer (another £80, but at least it would be useful as I didn't already have one).

So with Blu-Ray drive attached I tried again.... with the same results. I know other people had got this running, but apparently not me (I subsequently wonder if the others that have done this were using stripes of 2 terabytes or less, an issue for WHS2011, apparently it can't handle partitons larger than this and mine were twice the maximum size).

That left only one thing to do, delete the RAID array and have the four drives visible individually (in my haste I forgot to consider having 2 drives mirrored, D'oh!) and use something like DriveBender of StableBit Disk Pool for duplication when they arrive. Not the end of the world.

So with the new drive configuration (and incidentally using the newly installed internal optical drive - well it was already in there) I started the install once again and... Success!!!!

I'm currently in the process of configuring, installing add-ins and copying over data, but so far I'm fairly impressed, especially with the remote access. One of my biggest issues is that the old WHS box takes so long to remote desktop into that by the time I attach it's shut itself down thinking it's the middle of the night and nobody is using it (a side effect of having Lights-Out running and incorrectly configured - unfortunately since I can't log in I don't get a chance to disable Lights-out!). I'll possibly just have to pull the drives out and attach them directly to the server to get to the data, awkward but hardly the end of the world.

The only other issue thus far is the fact that I removed the Blu-Ray drive... forgetting to eject the WHS 2011 install DVD. D'oh!

I'm yet to investigate how much juice the machine currently draws, and I expect with the drives not in use so powered down most of the time it's going to be an estimate anyway, however the drives are supposed to be "green" so I'm not expecting a terrible max power draw.

No doubt there will be another update soon.

Windows Home Server 2011

Well, it's about that time of year again to think about backups.

My initial posts on this blog were raving about Windows Home Server and detailing the creation and installation of my Windows Home Server version 1 machine. After a particularly painful experience with my previous server running Ubuntu, I was wowed with Windows Home Server and how it made so many things so much easier to achieve, at least in an environment where all my other machines were running Windows. As far as media serving duties and performing automated backups, it was like a breath of fresh air, at least initially.

I had plans to take it further moving the server hardware into the garage (there's no point keeping a back-up in the house if the house gets burgled or burns down in a fire!) and already have a hold drilled in the wall of the house that just needed to be widened to feed an RJ-45 cable through. Also by the power of the excellent Drive Extender technology in WHS v1 I planned on adding an obscene amount of extra storage over time and have the box work as a media hub too.

Then a change of job and finances put hold to these plans. The WHS box stopped playing nicely, essentially I would switch on the box and the hard drive activity would never subside, resulting in the box working but becoming incredibly slow. As a result of this I found I could back-up my laptop, but the desktop with its larger quantity of data would never complete a backup.

I tried for a while to solve this issue, but alas with no luck.

Then WHS 2011 was announced with better audio streaming, but shock horror without the awesome Drive Extender!

I, like many others, was unhappy about this (and I still am), but overall the update looked like one to get... when I had the money.

The upshot is that I lost interest in fixing my WHS v1, it literally seemed like more trouble than it was worth,  especially considering that in the meantime I started working in London again so had less time to tinker.

Worryingly as a result I've not had a complete backup of my primary desktop machine for some time now. Dangerous, and less than ideal.

Then I became single, so although I had fewer hours in the evenings to tinker after my commute home, I did have some free time... but still apparently not enough motivation to fix the WHS v1 box.

A few days ago I stumbled across a piece of news saying how the WHS 2011 software could now be had for a few pennies over £37. This seemed like a bargain too good to be true and re-kindled my interest in sorting out my backups, so I ordered myself a copy which has now duly arrived.

Now I needed to start thinking about hardware to run Windows Home Server 2011 on. My original WHS v1 box was an old shuttle micro ATX machine I had recyceld from desktop duties. I had to become quite creative with this form factor to get my hard drive array in, it's short on memory, the processor is old and only 32 bit (unsuitable for WHS 2011) and the network interface was only 100 base-t... Oh, and even by removing the redundant graphics card it still eats 90 watts of power.

Lo and behold I stumbled upon the HP ProLiant Micro Server is selling for £250... and until the end of the July 2011 has a £100 mail-in rebate!

The server only comes with 1 gigabyte of memory and a 250GB hard drive, so I'll be taking them out (The HDD may find its way into my desktop machine) and putting in 4 gigabytes of ram, and either 2 or (more likely) 4 two terabyte eco green drives,  hopefully in a 0+1 raid array (which will be just mirrored if the motherboard can't handle that).

I figure this configuration SHOULD be quite safe, so I'll then move all my media to the new server ready for DLNA access from the rest of the network (other windows machines, the XBox 360 and the TV itself) and remotely.

The server should draw less than 30 watts fully loaded and has a 1000 base-t network port, which should offer faster backups and general access.

After this machine is up and running it will be time for stage 2: my hifi has just stopped playing CDs so I'm planning on getting a dedicated surround system for the TV, along with some additional kit (possibly a Sonos system) for the kitchen, bedroom and lounge itself. That's a long way off just yet, but should be possible in the not too distant future, and now with WHS serving the local media.

The server box is ordered, I'll order the additional drives and memory later, and I'll update on how it goes in a later post.

Has the 3DS changed my behaviour?

I picked up, purely as an impulse buy, a Nintendo 3DS on launch day (Friday 25th March 2011 in the UK). Since then I've been acting a little differently, for 2 reasons.

1. I've been keeping the 3DS with me in my trouser pocket much of the time, and possibly walking a little more.

Why?

The 3DS has tilt switches and so, in addition to other uses, acts as a pedometer. Now I can compare how much walking I've done each day.

In addition to this, walking will also earn you "coins" which can be used in some games, up to a maximum of 10 coins per day. (Un)fortunately I can walk far enough to earn all my daily coins just by walking to the station first thing in the morning on the way to work. I can't help thinking it's a little too easy to get that booty.

2. I'm walking via different routes.

This is not only to rack up a few more steps, but also to pass as many people as possible. The 3DS has a feature called "Street Pass" which, if the console is sleeping rather than powered off, will exchange data with other 3DS users as you get near them. This data includes game functionality for supported games (for example Lap Times for Ridge Racer, Characters for Street Fighter) and adds their Mii to the Plaza on your console. This Mii can then be used to, for example, help you complete a 3D image, or help rescue your own Mii (which has been captured in one of the games).

All in all, providing these two motivations for keeping the 3DS with me at all times is clever marketing by Nintendo; it keeps the console at hand and makes it more likely to be used, and therefore more likely that I'll buy more games for it.

Until the novelty passes anyway...

Oh, and by the way, the 3D is yet to make me feel dizzy, which is a surprise since I can't play first person shooters without getting motion sickness.