Windows Home Server, Day 8

No, you're not missing any posts. I've jumped from Day 4 to Day 8.

Last night WHS box passed the "Yep, still looking good" test, and got promoted to the dark closet beneath my stairway. No keyboard, mouse or monitor anymore. Just the AC cord and an ethernet cable. Don't cry because it's lonely though. It has company: The Media Center box that previously had the closet all to itself.

Later I used Remote Desktop connection to log into the server, and poke around. All looked good, and it was only using about 309 MB of committed memory. With indexing enabled, it does use a bit more, and I'll probably break down and buy another 512 MB of memory to keep it happy. I'll also likely need another UPS if I want power monitoring. If only there was some way to have one UPS communicate via USB cable with multiple machines...

Of my terabyte of storage, I've still got about 650 GB free. I have all my photos and music using "duplication", but my 33 ripped DVDs are in a non-duplicated folder.

Over the weekend, I also pointed the Media Center "DVD" path to point at the Videos folder. My wife was genuinely impressed to see all the random DVDs we've collected show up on Media center.

I've also changed the kitchen laptop to never suspend. Instead, the screen saver displays random photos from the "Photos" folder on the WHS box. It's a great way to be reminded of past memories without having to manually browse your photo collection. It's also an easy way to make sure your server is still kicking. :-)

Comments

• Anonymous
  January 30, 2007
  What was it that was causing it to hang overnight?

• Anonymous
  January 30, 2007
  No idea what caused the crash. I ran the Microsoft memory analyzer for several hours and it didn't flag anything. The crash hasn't happened against since then. Keep your fingers crossed!

• Anonymous
  January 30, 2007
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  January 31, 2007
  I would enable ETW tracing with a circular buffer, say a file of 20 MB. I would enable the basic kernel providers plus whatever is specific of WHS. If it crashes again you can look at the etl file.

• Anonymous
  January 31, 2007
  And I forgot, maybe enable the PnP ETW provider...

• Anonymous
  February 01, 2007
  AlienRancher: Good idea about the ETW tracing. I should have thought of that myself. The machines been OK since the first two days. Keeping my fingers crossed.

• Anonymous
  February 01, 2007
  Any idea if it can join a domain and use domain user accounts instead of whatever it's currently using?  That would be really important in some cases...

• Anonymous
  February 01, 2007
  Extended Trace Whatchamacallit?  What is it?

• Anonymous
  February 08, 2007
  what is the effective size of the server if i have 4 250GB disk? is it 0.5TB or 1TB? i ask for planning disk drive purchases in the future.

• Anonymous
  February 17, 2007
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  February 19, 2007
  The comment has been removed