Meglet Rambles On

Microsoft recently released a new product called Windows Home Server. It is built on the core of Windows Server 2003, with some functions removed and others added. WHS is meant to serve as a central hub in your home for photos, music, and documents, and includes the ability to back up Windows XP and Vista workstations by installing the WHS Connector. The WHS Connector also serves as the management tool for the server, in place of the Remote Desktop feature commonly used with business-class servers. One of the biggest new features is the way storage is handled. Any drive detected during the installation of WHS is automatically added to what is called a storage pool. If two or more drives are in the storage pool during installation, WHS automatically turns on a duplication feature on shared folders, which results in files in those folders being copied to a second physical drive for backup purposes. Any time a new drive is added to the WHS system, it can be added to the storage pool to increase the amount of available space.

WHS is available as a pre-built system from a number of vendors, with HP’s MediaSmart Server being one of the most popular. You can also purchase an OEM copy of just the operating system, and install it on any custom built system that meets the minimum requirements. This is what I did.

I started running WHS when it was still a release candidate, on some old hardware I had laying around with a couple 250GB hard drives thrown in. Mostly, I wanted to test out WHS and see if it was the solution I was looking for to have a central location for storing all of my movies, TV Shows, and music. It most certainly was, and I waited anxiously for the official US release so I could buy the final version and upgrade my server hardware. When it was finally available, I upgraded my WHS server hardware to a new ASUS motherboard with an Athlon X2 64 4000+ processor and 2 GB of memory. Then I started adding hard drives. I had 4 500GB hard drives left over from a previous server, 2 500GB hard drives to pull out of a non-functional Western Digital MyBook World (technically it functioned, but network transfer speeds were horrible,) and I picked up 2 750GB drives to use as the primary drives for total available storage of 4.02TB (I know that doesn’t add up, I’ll have to double-check the drive info later.) One limitation of the storage pool in WHS is that you can only copy as much data as there is space available on the primary drive. WHS moves the files off the primary drive and onto drives in the rest of the storage pool as long as there is space available, but all file transfers start on the primary drive.

The reason I wanted a central storage location is because I have quite a mix of computers and operating systems accessing my media, not to mention large DVD and CD collections. The goal is to digitize everything, and be able to access the digital copy from my MacBook, my AppleTV, my Windows XP desktop, my Windows 2003 Server, or my Vista Media Center Home Theater PC.

Once I had the WHS system set up the way I wanted (you have to create users and give them access to folders, plus I wanted some specific shared folders that needed to be created) I started moving my DVD and CD collections onto it. The CD collection was easy, as I ripped that into iTunes a few years ago have kept up with importing every new CD into iTunes. I just copied my primary iTunes library to the server, then I got an add-in from We Got Served called Program Launcher that allowed me to create an iTunes shortcut in the WHS console, launched iTunes, and shared my library. I’m still working on automating the addition of new files to iTunes, right now I use a manual process of copying the files to a shared folder on the server, then dragging them into iTunes.

The DVD collection is almost as easy to set up on the WHS, it’s just more time consuming. Because I watch my movies on my Vista HTPC, and I want to keep all the menus, special features, and surround sound, the DVDs are stored in a Video_TS folder inside the movie folder. By using the structure of MovieName/Video_TS, I can create custom folder images by putting a folder.jpg file in the MovieName folder, then launch the DVD Gallery in Vista Media Center and browse through the movies easily.

The nice thing about WHS is that you don’t HAVE to install the connector just to access the shared folders. The connector is installed on my XP desktop computer, which also allows that computer to be backed up. But for folder access, I just browse to the server name in Windows Explorer, and create a mapped drive for my most commonly accessed drives on my Vista PC and 2003 Server (which also functions as a second desktop PC.) On the MacBook, I just have use Finder to go to a server, and type in smb://servername and I can see the list of shares available. For really easy access, I created a folder in my Home directory that has an alias pointing to each share (Photos, Music, Movies, etc) available on the server.

Just last week I added an AppleTV to the mix of devices accessing the WHS. Setup was really very simple, especially since I already had iTunes installed. Turn on the AppleTV, and wait for it to show the access code. Open iTunes on the WHS (using Program Launcher in the Connector, as noted above) and select the AppleTV from the devices menu. Enter the code that is shown on the AppleTV, name the aTV, and choose the content to by synced. Voila! instant access to all the files in iTunes on the server.

In the 4 months since setting up the WHS, I have managed to fill 2/3 of that 4.02TB of drive space, so pretty soon it will be time to add more storage. But until then, it just sits in the corner behind the couch, connected to nothing but a power cord and an ethernet cable, and serves up whatever files I want to access without complaint.