JC - Technology and Stuff

Well it seems to work - mostly.

I have to say I am a little underwhelmed by Windows Home Server having used it for a couple of days now. I guess you could argue that being underwhelmed is a good thing in that it is supposed to sit in the background and just work. Well, quite honestly if it did that then I would be better pleased. So far Windows Home Server has been a little bit of a home maintenance nightmare. Or is it just teething problems?

Let’s rewind. After successfully implementing Windows Home Server on my aging Pentium 4 Windows 2003 Server, I logged out of the server like I was told advised and went to one of my home PCs - actually my little Dell laptop which runs Windows XP. I inserted the ‘Home Server Connector CD’ and let the software load. After a couple of uneventful minutes I was connected to my Home Server and browsing its nothingness. I say that because of course the install hadn’t loaded anything onto my Server, just reformatted the Hard Drive and created some empty folders. What to do I asked myself?

Aha, Remote Access. I remembered that one of the reasons I wanted Home Server was because of Remote Access. That’s not being able to connect to the server while I’m at home, but being able to connect to it when I’m not at home! I managed to navigate to the Settings page and from there find Remote Access and this was when things started to go a little downhill. There is no step-by-step guide and no ‘introduction to remote access’, all there is is the not so wonderful Microsoft Help system. Still I figured out that I had to first turn the features ON. Then it seemed obvious that I had to click the ‘Router’ button as it was next on the list. This was my first mistake. Actually the ‘Domain Name’ should have been the next choice - but I didn’t know that. Anyway, I went ahead and let the system auto-configure my router and it then reported back that all was OK, all apart from the Remote Access part! Yeah right, how can Remote Access be OK if that part actually doesn’t work? I pressed Help and it led me to a page that talked about configuring my domain. Duh, of course. Like I said, that should have been the second button on the screen (or maybe even a wizard for first time users Microsoft??). So I configured my domain. It had me supply a Windows Live ID (which was a little weird but as I have one I guess that wasn’t too much of a pain) and then it prompted me to specify what my home domain should be called. I did that too. The system then performed a number of checks and told me that my domain was not accessible via Remote Access. Hmmmm. Not working as expected.

I thought about this for a few seconds and wondered if it had anything to do with the fact that my router is behind another router that has my Internet connection? I had previously thought this may be an issue. Both my routers have firewalls and both are configurable so in a sense the first router was redundant. I just had to keep it because my Verizon DSL connection came to it. My sencondary router is my T-Mobile @Home router and I have that for a whole list of other reasons (see previous post). Anyway, I logged into my first router and disabled the firewall and then rechecked my domain. Still no access for Remote Access. I did some more digging in the wonderful not so good Help system and found a page that talked about forwarding my HTTP, HTTPS and Remote Access ports (80, 443 & 4125). I forwarded these ports in my source router to my @Home router, re-ran the domain tests and lo and behold it reported success. Then I went back to the Router Configuration button and re-ran the tests there too to make sure it was also all good. Hmmmm. No joy. These tests reported they could not validate that my server was accessible via a remote connection. So I brought up a browser, typed in my homeserver domain in the address bar and pressed return. Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

Aha. But then I thought about this. There is no way it should work from within my own network, behind my own router. It’s a little like using your own server to host a web site and then trying to contact it via the public name. It just doesn’t work. Unfortunately I had no way of testing if it was actually working correctly or not though. Or did I? I had my trusted Blackberry Curve at home. I turned wi-fi off and waited for the signal to revert to EDGE and then I loaded up the browser and typed in my domain name. I got an error message. But that was a good thing. It was a javascript error message. That meant it was actually reaching my server and was trying to do something. I made a mental note to myself that I would try the connection from work on Monday to see if it actually worked.

I spent some time later that day copying all my photos and music over the Home Server and was pleased it all seemed to be working. I slept well on Saturday night. So far so good I hear you say. I wish that after this point nothing happened. Unfortunately life turns its circle and things change.

Sunday brought chaos to my ordered household. During the night two things had happened. Number one the Server had downloaded a million updates it wanted to install. And number two it had backed up my desk PC. Firstly I let it install the updates it wanted. Everything appeared to go well. Then it wanted to update the Connector program that allows me to log on to the Server from any of my home PCs. I’m fairly sure that was the straw that broke the camel’s back. As soon as I had updated my connector, the Server informed me there was a problem with Remote Access. So I went to the screens and re-ran all the tests as in the day before. Every time I got a message that there was an ‘unexpected communication problem’ and my domain remained unconfigured. Not a good sign. No matter what I did, the problem did not go away and at first I thought it may be a Microsoft problem at their end with their servers but I googled the error message and found some disturbing news.

The only mention I could find of the error message I received was on a German language forum. Thankfully Google did an interesting job of translating the page for me and I got the impression that this was a problem that comes about after upgrading the Server software and connector. There appeared to be no known solution for it. Furthermore, the wonderful ‘Health’ part of Windows Home Server tells you its health is ‘Critical’ if you don’t update its software when it wants you to. So if you don’t upgrade, your health is marked as Critical and if you do then things stop working. Bottom line - no Remote Access now.

Oh and that brings me to the backup part of my story. As I mentioned before Home Server had diligently backed up my PC in the middle of the night. 35gb of it!!!! How on earth? Didn’t it use any compression? Didn’t it check to see if it had any copies of anything already on the server? So, it’s an unattended backup program - but it’s a stupid backup program too. Now my server Hard Disk was half full after just one backup. On my old system I only used to backup like 4gb or 5gb at most. Aaaaarrrgggghhhh!!

My day was fast going downhill. After several very bad and frustrating hours (during which the Seattle Seahawks also lost) I decided the only thing for it was to re-install Home Server and turn off updates. So I went through the whole install thing again and one and a half hours later I was back at my original state with a working domain (I hoped). The good thing about the re-install was that it preserved all my data. The bad thing about the install was that it preserved all my data!! (My 35gb backup was still there). At that point I thought to myslef that maybe the backup was just a partition and maybe it wasn’t actually using 35gb. After all, that really did seem a lot of backup space. So I went to my laptop PC and performed a manual backup. That failed! Of course the Server really was using all that space and before long my server Hard Disk got full. I do have a network drive with over 100gb of space on it but there’s no way to add it to the server. Windows Home Server will only recognize local drives. I feel another spending spree coming on just to be able to perform unattended backups. I really don’t know if it’s worth it. I’ll address that in another post.

So, I’d spent the best part of the weekend messing around with Home Server and had experienced very mixed reactions. When I woke up anew on Monday morning I was informed yet again that my Server’s health was Critical as it needed to install more updates. i assume these are the same updates that broke the thing in the first place! I don’t know what I’m going to do about that.

Anyway, I got to work and tried to access my Home Server from my browser. Guess what? It actually worked! The Remote Access lets me browse my server files and upload or download files. Not bad as a remote file store. Apart from that it seemed very limited. Maybe there’s some more Help on other features that are available (yeah, right!).

So, all in all I’ve had a very mixed experience using Windows Home Server. Like I said at the beginning, I am underwhelmed. Will it be worth the spend of $150 to purchase it at the end of the 120 day trial? I’m not so sure. Maybe a cheap backup program will do the job better. Couple that with Mesh and Zoho (which I already use and are FREE) and I’ll have all the functionality that Home Server seems to offer me. I need to make a decision pretty quickly though as I’m going to need to buy another Hard Disk if I continue using Home Server as my backup tool. I’ll report back soon on how things go. One thing is for certain though. If I install these Critical upgrades and it takes my setup down again then I’m reloading my old Windows Server 2003. That just worked…

This entry was posted on Monday, September 8th, 2008 at 4:37 pm and is filed under Home, PC Tool, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.