Windows Home Server Beta 2 Signup
http://connect.microsoft.com/windowshomeserver
Go, sign up for this beta! It’s the only Microsoft product that seems really exciting at the moment, excluding Office 2007.
What is Windows Home Server? It’s essentially Server 2003, configured to run as a headless machine (ie. no monitor, keyboard etc required) and made very home friendly. It has a very nice backup system that automatically backs up all (well, 10) of your machines in a way so that it doesn’t take up very much space on your server. It also has a very easy to use GUI to configure it: it’s not your typical router config page-style GUI, it’s a nice looking app that runs on the server and remotes back to you to give you a fancy Win32 UI. You can also RDP in and get an administrator’s desktop, and then have full control over your machine. Therefore you can run all your favourite server-y apps on there, Apache, MySQL, uTorrent with its web user interface, etcetc. And, you can write software specifically for the server config interface. Plus, it has a very nice, secure system for remotely accessing all of your server content via a web browser. It has got pwnage written all over it.
Sure, most people who want one of these already run Linux or FreeNAS (it’s a FreeBSD distro) on an old Pentium II. But does FreeNAS have a really nice configuration interface? Ability to add and remove hard disks to the storage pool without any complexity (as opposed to RAID)? A backup system that looks at the clusters on your hard disk and only stores data once? Plus, if your machine craps itself, can you boot off a DVD and instantly (well, give or take an hour) restore your whole machine from the server, back to how it was at 12AM last night? If you spent a lot of time hacking away at code, you could probably get FreeNAS to do it for you. But why not save yourself the time? 
Anyway, I’m crossing my fingers hoping that I’ll get into the beta, because this looks like it’s going to be an awesome product. I haven’t been this excited since I saw a video demo of Longhorn back in 2003 (that was of course before they fucked up, stopped it, and made Vista which isn’t nearly as exciting)
–Ben
February 17th, 2007 at 12:46 am
Meh, I prefer my headless server (with a serial console in case I ever need it), and Linux-Vserver (Linux-Vserver is very resource efficient, I’ve currently got 4 virtual servers working perfectly on a Pentium III 650 MHz with 256 MB RAM
)
“instantly (well, give or take an hour) restore your whole machine from the server, back to how it was at 12AM last night? ”
I’d just rsync a backup over
“really nice configuration interface”
Webmin is nice enough for me
“uTorrent with it’s web user interface”
It’s = Contraction for “it is” or “it was” or something
Its = Possessive, belonging to it
February 17th, 2007 at 1:43 am
Mmm, headless Linux is good .. but as I’m more of a Windows-oriented guy (though I’m trying to change that, look at my more recent posts..) I like the idea that there’s a Microsoft server offering targeted at me and what I want to do.
Sure you can do nice backups with rsync, but it’s not really as simple to do when you’ve got Windows machines. Plus with rsync, it goes by a file-level, whereas the WHS goes by each disk cluster. It also prevents duplicate clusters over multiple machines from being written to disk, so you can back up 4 PCs with 500GB of data using just 200GB of space easily.
And, I fixed the it’s thing.