www.nickhodge.com

After becom­ing increas­ingly frus­trated with the Tran­quil Home Server, I decided to de-commission it. The drivers required at install time didn’t work, and Tran­quil tech­nical sup­port (online and via email) just didn’t work. #epicfail

There is a mother­board con­fig­ur­a­tion called Mini-ITX where the dimen­sions are 170mm x 170mm. Intel have a great board with 1Gb Eth­er­net, 4 USB and a PCI con­nector. Adding memory, a SATA HD and case: and you have an instant Win­dows Home Server. I used the Win­dows Home Server media and serial num­ber from the Tranquil.

What I purchased:

The case:

Build­ing the hard­ware took less than 10 minutes, and the soft­ware install time (fresh) was less than an hour, includ­ing format­ting the drive.

Now installed at home, repop­u­lat­ing the data and get­ting on with life. I feel way bet­ter hav­ing built this myself.

Oh, and the kit­tehs like the box the case arrived in:

It has been a little blog­ging quiet of late. Partly due to pre­par­a­tion for demon­stra­tions in the next few weeks, and other email tasks.

Two major events have clouded out-of-hours pro­ductiv­ity: The Win­dows Home Server crumpled with a BIOS boot­ing error. This required get­ting a spe­cial USB re-setup key from the UK from TranquilPC.

Win­dows 7 rocks. Still can­not believe how much I can do with this beta oper­at­ing sys­tem. How­ever, the choice of par­ti­tion­ing the hard disk was not a wise move. Espe­cially if you mix up your par­ti­tions the wrong way. I blame my choices, cer­tainly not Win­dows 7

Onwards.

Win­dows Home Server Power Pack 1 is now avail­able.

Power Pack 1 fixes the data cor­rup­tion bug as well as deliv­ers sig­ni­fic­ant new func­tion­al­ity including:

· x64 sup­port for home com­puters run­ning Win­dows Vista

· Home Server Shared Folder backup

· Improved remote access experience

· Improve­ments to power con­sump­tion and performance

· Loc­al­iz­a­tion sup­port for Japan and China

Double check Tran­quil PC’s web site. They say its all good-to-go

Install, restart the server as instructed.

Back on Gen­eral Melchett, Install the new x64 Con­nector. Done.

It all works!

The Win­dows Home Server team abso­lutely rock. OK, I work for Microsoft and am paid to say that.

Well, today I am on hol­i­day. So, I am say­ing this as private cit­izen Nick Hodge.

Listen­ing to users, research­ing and fix­ing bugs quickly; and adding reques­ted fea­tures in an open and rapid way. This is the way to make software.

Watch Todd provide an over­view of the forth­com­ing Power Pack 1:

Win­dows Home Server Power Pack Announced

My per­sonal thanks for pop­ping x64 cli­ent sup­port in there.

My Win­dows Home Server just sits on my gig­abit net­work, and well, works.

Since my last post­ing, I’ve added a 750Gb external hard drive bring­ing the total stor­age to some­thing near­ing 2Tb.

Oth­ers are pimpin’ their install­a­tions: a major shout out goes to Andrew Dug­dell and his combo home MAME / Home Server.

The recent install­a­tion of the Win­dows Media Cen­ter has been an ongo­ing major pro­ject. Apart from the phys­ical install, there has been a a few ongo­ing issues:

1. High-Definition TV “green screen of death”.
   Thanks to the Vista and XP Media Centre forum, this is a known and fixed issue. The Microsoft Hot­fix is avail­able here.
2. Elec­tronic Pro­gram Guide
   Attemp­ted to install epg­Stream. Will install ICE.TV instead (giv­ing a refer­rer to PMM!) as epg­Stream isn’t work­ing the way I expec­ted. Could be user expect­a­tion error.
3. Noise
   Once the pro­cessor gets going, fans go on. And never seem to turn off. This is prob­ably a BIOS tweak fix, or turn down the pro­cessor a little. A PATA drive vs. SATA drive may also be an issue, too.
4. IPtv
   So, where is Aus­tralian IPtv? What about Aus­tralian video down­loads? For that mat­ter, what’s the story behind epis­ode guides? This should just work.

Dur­ing tweak­ing the server on Tues­day, I de-installed Win­dows Live One­care Fam­ily Pro­tec­tion. Installing it in the first place might have been my error. From what I can dis­cern, after de-installation, the rem­nants of a fire­wall was left around. 6 hours of troubleshoot­ing later, I decided to restore a pre­vi­ous work­ing ver­sion of the Media Cen­ter setup.

Thank­fully, Win­dows Home Server had an image of an auto­matic backup from Monday. Pro­cess to fix:

1. Make a Restore CD from the sup­plied .ISO file
2. Reboot with Restore CD
3. Log into the Home Server
4. Select the image to restore
5. 18 minutes later, reboot
6. Back to Monday night’s Win­dows Media Center

Rather than stuff around for another 6 hours, restor­ing a known-good backup saved my sanity.

Yes, I know that the cor­rect eng­lish spelling of Cen­ter is Centre.

Thanks to the gen­er­os­ity of Jeffa, I scored an old Mini-ATX case with power sup­ply. Yeah, being the junior on the team — I get all the hand-me-downs.

Some hun­dreds of dol­lars later from AUS­P­CMar­ket, and I have my first ever:

1. AMD based PC (AMD Athlan64 x2 6000+)
2. Giga­byte Mother­board PC (GA-MA69GM-S2H)
3. Self-constructed PC (only a screw­driver required)
4. Media Cen­ter PC (Vista Ultimate)
5. Microsoft Wire­less Key­board 8000

Not being a hard­ware type, the mov­ing of cables, CPUs, fans, more cables and stuff made the phys­ical con­struc­tion a little longer than an expert. There are still some internal wir­ing bits to com­plete: hard disk light at the front and CD audio. Also missed that the our Acer LCD TV has VGA and PC Audio. The cables I pur­chased were not correct.

The toughest part was installing the power to the SATA DVD/CD drive, and ensur­ing the CD eject but­ton had enough clear­ance to work.

The first PATA (this was a sur­prise!) hard disk was stuffed, so off to plan B with a 500Gb PATA and we’re away. The mother­board would not boot up with this hard disk attached; so the old disk is a throw away.

Using the onboard graph­ics and USB based TV tuner is prob­ably sub-optimal. Need to fix these.

To add/change

1. Dual chan­nel PCI DVB-T card
2. DivX sup­port (com­plete at 9:40pm)
3. TV Guide so I can record TV successfully.

Oh, and the cats love the extra space. The case and CPU are quiet and rel­at­ively cool. The cave aspect of the case make it a per­fect hunt­ing spot:

I just love pok­ing fun at our pommy over­lords.

The Tran­quilPC is setup, back­ing up and not keep­ing the cats warm. It runs too silently and cool.

Acquis­i­tions today. I hope Avril isn’t read­ing this:

1. Win­dows Home Server from Tran­quil PC

After much pro­cras­tin­a­tion, I’ve decided to buy some­thing that’s already built. And isn’t going to require lots of coal to be burnt to keep the thing going.

2. Meraki Stand­ard Mesh

All the cool kids were doing it, hon­est! Attempt­ing to wire up Liam whilst he is at school. The antenna pur­chased in Fry’s has helped out within the house, but doesn’t beam far enough.

3. A sur­prise that should be arriv­ing tomorrow.

@aeoth wins the small com­pet­i­tion: Mel­bourne Win­dows Home Server–install off.

Don’t know what he’s going to win yet. Maybe a new cir­cu­lar saw?

Well done, dude. Good server name, too

Like to make your own Win­dows Home Server? David Flynn from APC Magazine in Aus­tralia has some local col­our on how to. Even the Win­dows Home Server team have found the Aus­sie love for a bar­gain and rolling your own.

Update 15^th Octo­ber 2007: Ars Tech­nica Review