Servers and Clients, Homes!
This past weekend, I upgraded our network to bring it closer to what I envision it being over the next few months. More specifically, I upgraded all of our client machines to Windows 7, took our acting server and installed Home Server Power Pack 3, and set the server’s shares up to better reflect the way I intend the network file structure to be.
So… my thoughts on Home Server. The good? It works as advertised, and seems to run faster and more efficiently than, say, running windows 7 and setting up a half-assed server. The bad?
Aah, the bad. For some reason, Windows Home Server did not recognize my dynamic drives as being “real.” Being new to the WHS interface, I assumed that adding a drive to the data tab was simply adding it as a listed drive. Alas, this was not the case… and as the drive was not formatted as a basic drive, it just went ahead and formatted the drive without asking.
Have you ever recovered data from a spanned drive? No? I don’t recommend it. Not. Fun.
That was the only major fuckup in the whole process, but there are a few nitpicks I have.
One: I cannot disable the PC backups manually per machine. Not that I will want to when I get our real WHS, but space is at a premium right now. I may be missing the option, though.
Two: Setting up shares is very dumb-proof, but I would prefer to be able to set manual mapping without having to do some Admin Panel tweaking. Along the same lines, I’d like the WHS client console to support mapped drives. My network relies heavily on mapped drives on the client side (it makes managing data deliciously simple.) I can has mapped drives?
Three: WHS does not show the drive space on the data drives properly. This is really, truly a nitpick… but how hard would it be to reflect the correct drive space?
The add-ins installation and documentation could use some work too… and despite promises, I have yet to get my 120 day trial key.
Other than that, I think it’ll be a go. Why not just install Server 2008? Media streaming and the automatic back ups.
