Be Excellent To Each Other

Ooh, nice spot.

If ______ or Doctor Glyndwr have their home server kit yet, can they give me an idea of noise levels under light load and a heavy thrashing, if possible? Ta.

Mine is coming tomorrow. I will report back. Reviews I've read say it's pretty quiet.

I have it! It's very small and very shiny. Will report on noise levels tonight.

**sorry for cluttering up yer bargains thread**

FAO: Mr. Cringle

RE: HP MediaSmart Server Noise Levels

Short version: it's very quiet.

Longer version: it's a lot less noisy than my just-pre-Jasper-iteration xbox. Also quieter than my desktop PC. In my experience, however, noise levels are a pretty personal thing - what's practically silent to one person can be insufferably loud to another. So, I'd say it's as good as unnoticable when idling, but your mileage may vary...

As for when it's getting thrashed: hard to tell. I have another HD in the post; until it arrives I can only judge based on the unit with one HD. It seems to make the sort of noise you'd expect from a drive in operation, but so far it's *just* drive noise; haven't noticed the fan going mental or anything. This may change when more drives are added - hopefully Glyndwr will Opine Mightily when he gets his set up.

Of course, it's a server, so if you can attach it to the mains and ethernet you could chuck it into a wardrobe - all noise issues eliminated.

Hope this is somewhat useful to you, Mr. Cringle.

EDIT: Further derail, and sorry if this is old news, but:

Ta muchly.

I've talked myself out of one now though, on the basis that having an MSDN subscription means there's very little point getting something running home server when I can throw a machine together and stick a full server OS on it without it costing me any more.

I think it's Quiet Quiet but not Very Quiet. My DNS-323 is very quiet, as it has a mostly-not-on 40mm fan; the loudest part of it is the hard drives themselves. This HP unit is louder than that, it has some modest permanent fan noise. I daresay you can google for Db(A) values.

Bloody thing won't connect at gigabit speeds to my network, however, which is really hampering my transfer of 1.3Gb of stuff to it. I suspect my cables are to blame.

Home Server has loads of bits that the full Server editions lack, plus this one comes with extra HP bits (like the ability to put DVD ISOs on it and have the server transform them into iPhone or other platform compatibile files, or licences for Firefly and Twonky media servers). Can you get Home Server on MSDN? Plus the hardware is nice -- small case, low noise, low power, four hot-plug drive bays.

Should this discussion be split out?

That would be nice. But it might just be a thread for me to plead with you for technical assistance. So, um, yeah; I VOTE YES (is this a democracy?).

Yeah, I'm wondering whether the OS includes anything that I couldn't do as easily with free third-party tools. Plus it would give me a home domain again, which is something I like to have as it makes managing the various machines easier.

I really like the hardware, I'm just wondering whether I can get something similar built for cheaper, considering I won't need to pay for the OS.

This thread smells like Trekkies and meat pies.

There's a good visual tour of the OS and the HP tools here:

http://www.mediasmarthome.com/article/1 ... On-Review/ (particularly page 3 onwards)

Yeah, you could put most of this together yourself, but it'd be no easier than building a Linux server. I could have done that too but frankly I don't want to pour dozens of hours into getting each tiny little thing working.

I'm not convinced I want most of it though. A machine running quietly in a cupboard with a fuckton of storage that acts as a DC, torrent downloader, and is running TVersity is about all I need.

I'll have a gander at that link.

Mac mini?

Do you think you belong in this thread? I do not. Take your toy PC and leave.

Help! I'm being oppressed!

Damn right, Fruit lover!

Well, as this thread exists I might as well fill it with stuff. Guess it might be of use to somebody, sometime - if nothing else it'll probably demonstrate why buying a home server while having no knowledge about networking or, really, anything at all may be a suboptimal idea.

Initial setup went fairly smoothly. Inserted the CD to install the client software on the main desktop PC. It's pretty serious about password strength, but after a bit of coaxing it will accept something that's longish and features a mix of upper case and numerals. Whew. It's moaning about there being no antivirus and remote login being disabled but that can be dealt with later. Looking through the settings bit, there's a section for turning on Windows Update. Splendid; that gets set to auto and the Update Now button... updates some stuff. There’s also a new start menu item on the PC which seems to promise to update the client software. More updating ensues. And, seemingly, breaks something.

The Media Collector tab on the server is reporting that it can't interact with the PC because of some software clash. A few minutes of frantic googling reveals that this is a Known Issue and recommends re-installing something-or-other from a directory on the server (apparently installation programs are stored there). Sadly, although the server drive is visible it seems I can't access it without creating a user account. On trying to that, I'm advised that the main account should use the same username and password as the PC. Sounds fine, until it starts whinging about my PC password being a bit pisspoor. Actually, this works really well; after whacking in my PC password but with, y'know, a capital letter at the start and any i's changed to 1's (that's what everybody does, right?) it detects the mismatch and offers to change the PC password to match the PC-esque password on the server. Nice. So now I can access the server drive, which, as you'd expect, has all the usual empty Windows directories (Music, Photos, Videos et cetera) plus the installation app repository. The thing I'm meant to be clicking on is there (WHSConnectorInstall.exe, despite it being the Collector thingy which is throwing a fit) and it's smart enough to know it has already been installed and do the whole uninstall-reinstall process. And this works!

The PC is now apparently happily connected to the server. I have no clue what version of whatever thing that was I now have installed (did I just upgrade or downgrade or, um, statusquograde?) but as it has stopped bleating I consider this a good evening's work. Also, the other antivirus and whatnot alerts - turns out you can set them to be ignored: ha! take that, recalcitrant server.

Dawning Realisation: this thing is probably going to take a while to get my head around. It being Xmastime, however, there's not going to be much time to tinker with it. Ah well, that's fine for day one. Sleepytime.

Meandering Aside: with customary lack of forethought, it was only when I came to connect my shiny new server that it became apparent that my router only has four etherkable holes. Which were all occupied. The easiest thing to do seemed to be to dig out an old wireless-g adapter and attach that to the PC. Obviously the driver disc was MIA, but that was welcome - have vague recollections of it installing some nasty skinned (skinned!) proprietary you-are-connected software which never, exactly, worked. Better off with just the plain old drivers. Googling led me to many, many sketchy looking websites with copies of said drivers (all with different and contradictory version numbers, obviously). Picked one at random; amazingly, this worked. [SPOILER: this will become a plot point in the next instalment]

Nghh. I still don't know what I want to do. Once it's up and running can you RDP onto the box and use it as a normal windows box, or can you only do things via the console?

See, I really want to be able to use it as a DC, which isn't possible with home server, but I think I'd probably ruin the box by blasting 2008 server over the top of it. Ah, dilemmas.

Yes. RDPing to it to see what would happen was the first thing I did.

Why do you want a DC so badly? The Home Server does prompted password syncing, which is a pretty neat compromise in my opinion. You create user accounts on the Home Server, and if you log into a connected client Windows machine with a different password, it pops up a "passwords are not in sync" warning with "copy password from server to this machine" and "copy password from this machine to server" options.

That's not a neat compromise, it's a hideous cludge.

And I want a domain because I'm a control freak. The very idea that a user account on one machine is in no way linked to the same user account on another machine veritably terrifies me.

It's a neat solution given that Microsoft removed domain joining from all the home editions of Windows, thus meaning they can't offer domains on this device. In practical terms though, I'm not sure centralised user management is all that useful on a home network. How many users and PCs are you expecting to support?!

What do you want to know about it? I've spent the best part of a week setting it up and getting to grips with it. I reckon I can handle any questions. I'm very happy with it, by the way.

2 users on 5 machines. I JUST WANT TO, OK?

I want you to make me buy one. Sell it to me.

Yes. I kinda though there was some arbitrary stubborness going on.

Well, I don't really know what you want it to do.

Obviously, it's a desktop to log in to and run stuff, so that's your uTorrent sorted. And you can easily run extra software, both standard Windows stuff and special Home Server apps (that mostly amounts to config GUI hooks into the special Home Server interface console I think).

The backup tool is neat. Install Home Server Connector on the PC and out of the box it does bare-metal backups of all drives. Add exclude directories as necessary and define time windows during which the Server will use Wake on LAN to wake up the client PCs and do the backup tasks.

Backups can be manually preserved forever and started manually. You can configure how long it keeps each backup (default is a daily backup for three days, a weekly backup for three weeks, and a monthly backup for three months). When multiple machines are backed up, files that are common between them are only stored once on the server to save disk space. The device comes with a bootable optical disc that can be used to restore these backups onto a bare machine. None of this is rocket science, but it's easy to configure and look after.

Adding storage is piss easy. Insert drive (internal or USB or eSATA) and it says "should this drive be for backup or in the storage pool?". Select the second option and it adds it into the master storage.


By default, each share you add is only stored once on the drive; you tick a box for "duplication" and it maintains it on two drives in the pool as a redundant copy.

I've never seen any OS offer quite such painless config.

On top of that is a ton of HP only software. There's a free iPhone app that will stream music, videos, and photos from one of these servers to an iPhone out on the Internet. There's a Media Collector client tool that runs in the background on each machine on the LAN and uploads all music, video, and photo files it finds into the central storage pool. There's a video converter doodad that, amongst other things, will silently process DVD ISOs and spit out iPhone mp4 files. There's web-based remote access to your stuff, as well as an RDP gateway service. And it has licences for the Twonky and Firefly UPnP media server packages. Shockingly, that's genuine added value from vendor-added software.

I have plans with mine to install some darknet software so we can all start backing our HD movie collections up to each other's machines.

Hmm, ta. I shall consider further.

Of course, Craster, you could always get a Windows Home Server licence from MSDN and try it out on any random bit of kit you want. That would let you see how it goes and might swing you one way or the other on the HP server (which you'd probably still want, as it's small and quiet and has hot-swap drive bays etc etc.)

See, I don't much care for the home server product. What interests me is the hardware and all the HP bundled stuff.

It's in my shopping cart, I just haven't followed through yet.

Ohhh. You're yello'. I see.

You... need a shit?

I read this thread title as "Homer Server Solutions", which makes this post (and copuled with your avatar, Doc) all the better.

The problem I now have is that I have discovered just how shitty Sky Player is. I was really hoping to do away with my Media Center by getting this, on the basis that I can use Sky Player to substitute for the current recording of live TV that I do. But I can't, because there's sod all on there.

Just get Sky HD already.

It really annoys me that Sky Player is so crippled for watching anything that isn't sports or movies.

That's actually a good idea.

Home Server and Sky+HD ordered.

Good man. You won't regret it. You have my personal guarantee.

Not a guarantee.

Now to run a telephone cable across the middle of my living room so when the engineer comes round I can pretend it's always plugged in.