I was compelled to set up a file server because my clients maxed out their Dropbox. Originally, they were only sharing about 100MB worth of documents, so, I figured Dropbox was the ideal solution for them. Of course as they got real comfortable, they started sharing folders and moving enormous PDFs, .wav files and videos into the Dropbox. Needless to say, they maxed it out pretty quickly. I could upgrade their Dropbox, but then I’d have to upgrade everybody’s Dropbox and at this point there are at least ten different clients accessing the data at any given time. So, a dedicated file server seemed like the logical choice.

After reading Paul Thurrott’s review on the SuperSite a number of years ago, I had high hopes for Windows Home Server (WHS) but never had a reason to set one up until now. I was excited to try out a new Microsoft OS and have an always-on dedicated FTP file server to support the needs of my clients in a scalable way. So I did, I grabbed an old Compaq desktop PC that was given to me by a client who called it a “boat anchor” (a 2007 “vista capable” computer that came with Vista pre-SP1 installed on it) and told me to just get rid of it — obviously, I can’t do that — so now it is a file server.

I burned the MSDN ISO of WHS to a DVD/RW and began installing it. The installation screen had a strange mix of new and old; it has the same Windows XP installer look, but with some sleeker Windows Vista style informative tidbits. Half way through the installation it displays this oldschool looking DOS installer whereby it installs additional components, on the top of the screen it indicates Windows Server 2003, which WHS is based on. I’m told the stability is amazing.

WHS boots up and makes you do that Control-Alt-Delete thing to get in. I’m told that this is for security reasons, but I can’t exactly recall why. VNC lets you execute controls like C-A-D so I’m at a loss. Maybe it’s a dated security feature. Once you get to the desktop, you’re greeted with a local webpage indicating to you that you shouldn’t be using WHS directly, but rather via the Windows Home Console on another computer. Okay, fine, but I have to set all that up first. So, thanks for the premature warning I guess, Microsoft.

So, I close the awkward local html file warning page. Looking around, it looks like Windows XP, except a little off. The start menu is missing a bunch of stuff like on those heavily restricted public computers. All of the visual niceties have been disabled, so when you drag windows around there is that oldschool outline, Windows Classic theme, no fading/sliding on right-click, shadows, etc. It looks like Windows 98, XP and Vista all at the same time. And since it’s a server, that’s fine, however I thought that this OS was meant for somewhat novice home users to configure on their own? If that’s the case, then this whole thing definitely falls short in the ease of use/configuration category.

So, to begin, I click Windows Home Server Console and a wizard takes you through the steps of setting up the Console. It was simpler than I expected, considering the awkward and unfriendly UI experience it started with. Once it got to the remote access and Internet accessibility of the Console, however, things came to a halt. Cleverly, WHS tries to enable UPnP (Universal Plug and Play) in your router to make things easy. However, just like with ActiveX, UPnP was/is the cause of many security exploits and malware so by default, many routers have UPnP disabled — including the one I am using. So, I enabled UPnP on this Netgear router and then the wizard was able to proceed, however, it still briefly flashed that orange exclamation mark icon before stating that everything was A-OK and later on down the line it would tell me periodically that remote access functionality wasn’t working. To fix it, I would click repair and it would show me a spinny wheel for a while, then, somehow, it would be fine… for a while. Fortunately, I don’t rely on gimmicky “remote access” hubs/add-ins, I use the real deal: UltraVNC.

So, having read a great deal about WHS, I know what it’s meant to do and I elected to use it because I’ve heard such great things about the stability of Server 2003/2008, and since WHS is based on Server 2003, I figure that’s as stable as it’s gonna get. Also, the Console has a terrific quasi-RAID feature called “Folder Duplication” which will automatically make extra copies of whatever folders you select to a second drive installed on the server. That’s pretty awesome, especially since the “server” I am using is just a plain Compaq desktop with no onboard RAID.

After trying to set up my FTP server using FileZilla, I decided I wanted anti-virus protection because I don’t necessarily trust that my clients are going to always be using updated anti-virus software themselves. So, I went to download Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE) only to learn that Microsoft doesn’t support their own operating system, Windows Server 2003/Windows Home Server! So, I started looking around for other choices and was surprised to find a very limited selection. Still wary about WHS, I elected to go with a free a/v, ClamWin and see how that goes.

The Console has an “add-ins” section where you can extend the functionality of the Console with all sorts of third party extensions like audio-streamers, sync tools and anti-virus utilities. Installing ClamWin was, in a word, awkward. That’s fine, since it’s free and clearly stated as a work in progress by the author. Nevertheless, the fact that Microsoft doesn’t support their own MSE on their own operating system is very odd. WHS shares so many similarities to XP and I can’t imagine it would take much to make it work on there.

So I performed a virus scan with ClamWin. I didn’t have a very reassured feeling about the whole thing. In the terminal-like window it told me that my version was out of date, but not to panic (?). I went looking for a newer version and was unable to find it. Awkward.

Setting up FTP was difficult. I kept getting inconsistent results. It would connect fine on some connections and not others. VNC also presented an issue, it suddenly stopped working at one point providing me with a vague error message: “End of stream.” In six years of near-daily VNC use, on dozens of computers, I’ve never gotten that error message. I wasn’t using any of the Console features, anti-virus was awkward, FTP was inconsistent, VNC no longer functional — I reformatted & installed a standard Windows XP installation to see if it would better suit my needs.

Maybe not so surprisingly, after I disabled a bunch of unnecessary services, installed a hundred updates, and stripped everything down — my standard XP installation was more reliable and I was able to get everything (FTP, VNC, A/V) working and stable in about twenty minutes. To keep overhead as minimal as possible, I didn’t install any graphics drivers and disabled everything that wasn’t being used such as serial ports, audio drivers, etc. 800×600 resolution. Very easy to administer. Note the locked LAN IP “.45″ and custom port 8888 to make room for other systems on the same network to use VNC:

You cannot easily split an Ethernet jack the same way you can split a phone jack. So, I was at a loss for where to physically place the server. I decided to place it inside a box designed to house the modem/router and switch for the whole floor:

Problem is, since there’s no ventilation in the box, the server slowly started to bake. Not as hot as I was expecting, but when I saw the little flame icon on SpeedFan I decided it was time to move the server.

So, because each area of the floor only has one Ethernet jack, and they are all being used, I used a spare 16-slot rack-mounted switch & used that to split the Ethernet between the copier & server. The switch seems like overkill, but I didn’t have anything simpler or smaller to use. The temps are now stable at ~44°c.

So, WHS would be fine for other purposes I suppose. It’s designed to be this all-in-one hub for your LAN so that users can have auto-backups and easily accessible media. I can’t help but feel like it’s a stretch to expect the average user to set up something like this. I almost found it easier to set up the FTP server than to configure the WHS Console to be stable. Because it relies on UPnP as the default configuration method, it provides very little information on which ports to forward and doesn’t stress any importance on anti-virus protection. I’m betting that the UPnP will fail on 19/20 routers unless UPnP is explicitly enabled. Moreover, because everything is configured via the Console, why is the underlying OS Windows Server 2003? That Console application I’m sure could easily be ported to run on Windows XP, Vista or 7. It seems all seems very basic, yet overly complex for the average user — which it seems to be designed for. I think Microsoft can do better. I gotta wonder who is taking notes at their focus groups.

If you’re curious to try out Windows Home Server, and I know you are, Microsoft offers a 30-day trial of it.

Update: See our Top 5 Free Online Storage Reviews (11/1/2010) for more cloud storage goodness.

I’ve been in search of truly unlimited online storage for quite some time. I don’t mind paying, as long as it’s really unlimited. In my quest, I’ve come across a wide variety of services that fall short of their claims because they require the use of a proprietary client to facilitate the backups, thereby effectively making an online RAID 1 mirror. The catch is that if you delete something on your local machine, it will be deleted (typically within thirty days). So, they’re obviously not too worried about you using too much space since it is unlikely that you’ll have 100TB of data on your machines.

Nevertheless, Livedrive also offers a “briefcase” feature that essentially functions exactly the same as Dropbox, except with unlimited online capacity which is a very good deal if you were in the market for that. Aside from that, I’m going to dive right in and see if Livedrive can offer me with the kind of online storage that I require. I’d like to be able to upload a 250GB Acronis True Image .TIB file, for example… we’ll see if Livedrive can fill my needs.

Installing the Livedrive client is simple, though requires a reboot.

After the reboot, Livedrive starts up automatically and prompts you to login with the account you already registered online. There is no e-mail verification, though signing up for the free trial does require your address and phone number.

Thereafter you enter in your computer name, and then choose which folders to backup via a simple checkbox UI. The defaults are Documents, Pictures, Music, Desktop, Firefox Settings and “Favourites.” There is a button to “Add Folder” as well. A little window shows how to set Livedrive to backup new folders via right-click.

So far it doesn’t look like I’ll be able to upload a massive 250GB .TIB file and leave it there “backed up.”

I right clicked on a folder to add it to “monitoring” and sure enough it lets me know that it will auto-backup whatever changes I make. Unfortunately, there is absolutely no way to make a one-way archive/backup or a single file without having it be a “monitored” or “mirrored” folder existing on both the local computer and the Livedrive servers.

Disappointed, I signed up for the Livedrive “briefcase” which enables an “L:” drive which is accessible via any PC you link up to it. During the initial pitch, it said that you could upload files directly from the web UI. I realized shortly thereafter that whatever you upload must also stay synced to whatever PC you have set to have an L: drive, so you cannot have the data reside only in the cloud. Moreover, there doesn’t even appear to be a way to upload files directly from the web UI in the Briefcase. I can make a new folder, but that’s about it.

What bothers me about this is that it isn’t a true “backup service” in the sense that I cannot take a full image of a massive PC and then keep it in the cloud. No, instead I have to use their provided client and keep the image in both places. I can appreciate the convenience, and I can see how this tool is useful for most people, but I wouldn’t recommend it for those who are technically inclined. We’ll need to look elsewhere. That’s too bad.

Sam
admin@variableghz.com

I have a lot of stuff on my hard drives. Not all of it is entirely necessary. I have dozens of old 3d studio max files and other projects that have long since been completed or abandoned over the years.

I like the idea of having an off-site backup of non-mission-critical data. When I heard that Microsoft increased their online storage capacity on SkyDrive to 25GB, I became very interested. They have a cap on the filesize, 50MB per file. To work around this, I elected to use my favorite archiver — WinRAR.

Why WinRAR? The incredible compression and ease of creating spanning archives. All I do is right click on the folder I want to archive and select “Add to Archive”; when WinRAR pops up, I check the following:

- Create solid archive
- Test archived files

Then we gotta set the “compression method” from Normal to Best (this makes an enormous difference depending on the type of files you’re archiving). Next, we set the “Split to volumes, bytes” to a custom size of 45,000k (45MB, comfortably below the 50MB limit; we obviously don’t need to do this if the entire folder is less than 50MB) so that each archive will upload to SkyDrive successfully.

Before, Microsoft had an ActiveX plugin that enabled you to click and drag files into the browser to upload using only IE; now, they’ve made it work using Silverlight so it can work on all browsers. Hopefully they’ll use some fancy HTML5 stuff in the future. Since you’re going to be uploading a lot of files, use their silverlight plugin. It makes the uploads much more reliable and lets you view the progress. Below, you can see my progress uploading a lot of photos complete with nifty progress bars.

The navigation “breadcrumb bar” for SkyDrive no longer makes sense as far as I can tell. When you first load up SkyDrive, it clear indicates that you are at the beginning by displaying Username > SkyDrive. However, once you navigate inside of a directory, it then displays Username > Office > Folder. If I try to go “back” to the root SkyDrive folder by clicking the new “Office” button, it takes me to this Office “recent documents” area and a “Messenger social” — I don’t understand the reason for this bizarre linking scheme, but it appears to be a way for Microsoft to expose users to more of their online offerings.

The only way I can see to get “back” to SkyDrive from here is to hover the mouse over “Windows Live” on the upper left, and then clicking SkyDrive to get back to the root. Extremely bizarre. If it wasn’t for the 25GB of free space, I wouldn’t be recommending it here as your first choice for archiving large files. There are dozens of other “free” online cloud drive offerings, however, anything with any serious size like SkyDrive come and go frequently. SkyDrive has been around for a relatively long time and since it is offered by Microsoft, they have the luxury of running it for years without ever turning a profit… kinda like MSN Search, I mean, Windows Live Search, errr, I mean… Bing!

Ouch.

Here is what a series of RARs looks like uploaded to SkyDrive successfully:

I’ve found SkyDrive to be the perfect solution for this, if you know of any other large, reliable cloud storage solutions please by all means let us know.

Sam
admin@variableghz.com

For some of you, the thought of DOS probably brings back horrifying memories of things like IRQ conflicts, MSCDEX, the config.sys, himem.sys, etc. Those days are over, but the best aspects of DOS remain a part of Windows, fortunately.

Knowledge of DOS has been critical to my geeky endeavors over the last dozen or so years. Back in the nineties, as the GUI became pervasive and people seemed to have completely forgotten the command-line altogether, I continued to use it for a wide range of tasks. Yes, part of the reason I haven’t “let go” of DOS is in part nostalgic. The other part is that it has in fact been and remains very useful. Especially in troubleshooting and fixing low level problems that can’t be solved any other way.

So, you’re wondering what I could possibly have used DOS to accomplish? These days, for most things DOS can do, there is usually a free or paid application for Windows that does the same thing a little easier. Thing is, knowing how to do various tasks in DOS can help you repair Windows and perform a whole host of other tasks a lot quicker and often more efficiently than installing a bunch of different programs.

As a visual effects artist, I usually render out very large .tga sequences. From time to time, somebody will set the render options incorrectly and I will end up with a bunch of files that are missing an extension. So, if I called the sequence WalkSequence[####], the extension will be missing from some mistake in the render options. I could download a program that will automatically rename large groups of files for me, like the Bulk Rename Utility (direct download, x86, x64); or winautomation which is not freeware. You could also highlight all the files in Explorer and hit F2, rename the first file and then hit enter, however I don’t prefer this method.

What I do, is just use the DOS command REN or RENAME. With any DOS command, to learn the parameters and flags, just type the command and then /? after it. So, for REN, we’d type it like this:

REN /?

So, let’s say I had 1,000 files missing an extension. I’d type REN then the first filename followed by a wildcard (an asterisk in DOS) to indicate anything after then the new filename, and with the addition of the extension you want. DOS would then cycle through every single file matching the properties you defined, which is where the wildcards help. Like this:

REN WalkSequence* WalkSequence*.TGA

…which would turn your filenames into WalkSequence0001.tga and so on — and if you wanted to change .TGA to, say, .JPG, you would type it out like this:

REN WalkSequence*.TGA WalkSequence*.JPG

That’s it. When you type the command in DOS and hit enter, you won’t see any feedback, but the command will work. Some DOS commands issue feedback, some don’t.

XCOPY

Old folks don’t like launching applications like Acronis TrueImage and cwrsync. The XCOPY command has a tremendous amount of flags so it can be daunting to some folks. Don’t worry about it, as with any command, just step through the flags slowly and make it work for what you’re doing. The reason why I mention Acronis TrueImage and cwrsync, is because those are a couple of my favorite backup applications that I frequently use for law firms and computers in the home. Thing is, old folks forget to open seemingly complex programs like TrueImage and having to click buttons. They shut down the computers by accident, ruining my scheduled tasks, etc. So, my solution? XCOPY.

I need something as simple that (1) backs up the computer without any prompts whatsoever to confuse my computer illiterate clients; (2) be executed with a simple double-click; and (3) shuts down the computer when it’s all done.

XCOPY to the rescue. XCOPY allows me to do all of the above using a simple batch script. Let’s say I want to back up the Program Files directory to an external hard drive. The batch script I write would look something like this (E: is the external drive):

ECHO OFF
CLS
VERIFY ON

XCOPY C:\PROGRA~1\*.* /E /I /V /C /F /R /K /X /Y E:\

SHUTDOWN -S -C “Press ANY KEY in the COMMAND LINE WINDOW to ABORT THE SHUT DOWN PROCEDURE. Otherwise: This system WILL SHUT DOWN IN TWO MINUTES.” -T 120 -F

PAUSE
SHUTDOWN -A

Note: On Vista, the hyphen is no longer used and has been replaced with a forward slash. So, instead of SHUTDOWN -A, you’d type SHUTDOWN /A. I don’t know why Microsoft changed this.

Stepping through the flags individually, it isn’t as complex as it looks:

/E -Copies directories and subdirectories, including empty ones.

/I – If destination does not exist and copying more than one file, assumes that destination must be a directory.

/V – Verifies the size of each new file.

/C – Continues copying even if errors occur.

/F – Displays full source and destination file names while copying.

/R – Overwrites read-only files.

/K – Copies attributes. Normal Xcopy will reset read-only attributes.

/X – Copies file audit settings (implies /O).

/Y – Suppresses prompting to confirm you want to overwrite an existing destination file.

Notice how the flags, when combined, allow me to create the perfect execution of settings thereby permitting me to do exactly what I want, without any extra programs or complexities for my clients. All it takes is /?ing the commands to figure out how they work and tailoring them to your specific needs.

In future posts I will outline more specific examples of various commands and how they help me perform seemingly complex tasks in the Windows Recovery Console (such as FIXMBR, DISKPART, etc.) and others.

admin@variableghz.com