Welcome to part 2 of our look into the Windows Home Server Release Candidate 1 platform. In Part 1 of our series, I took a look at what it took to setup and install Windows Home Server (WHS). The system used for our WHS setup was an old Shuttle XPC system with a 2.4 GHz Pentium 4 processor, 512MB of RAM, and a lone 120GB hard drive. Installing WHS was fairly a straightforward process but getting the server up and running was just one step in the overall process. The next step is to get WHS ready for use by computers on a network and deploying the Windows Home Server Connector software on networked PCs. WHS’s main purpose is to provide a central location for all of your digital content – whether it’s multimedia or otherwise. In addition to offering a central file server, Windows Home Server is capable of monitoring the health of networked PCs as well as backing up the data on the systems. Thus to get things going, we’re going to take a look at the Windows Home Server Connector software, what it takes to maintain and administer WHS,  what it takes to set up users, share files, and backup your systems.

Getting Started – Installing the Windows Home Server Connector Software

So we have Windows Home Server up and running. What’s next? Get your networked computers connected to WHS. To get things going, you need to install the Windows Home Server Connector Software. You don’t need to do this if you simply want to access shared folders on your Windows Home Server. You can always access the shared folders by navigating to your WHS via UNC notation and accessing the shared folder names directly (assuming you also know the user accounts that have rights on the machine).  Of course – if no user accounts have been set up on Windows Home Server to begin with, then you should install the Windows Home Server Connector software (otherwise you’ll need to do administrative work right on the server itself). 

So what does this all mean exactly? Think of Windows Home Server Connector Software as a combination remote administration tool (a.k.a.remote desktop!) for Windows Home Server as well as a client application for monitoring and backing up networked and connected PCs. The Connector software allows users to remotely administer Home Server from anywhere on the home network – as long as they know the administrator password. Once in, you can monitor the health of the connected PCs on the network, create backup schedules of connected PCs, kick off backups of remote PCs, create or delete user accounts, create, monitor, or delete shared folders on the server, monitor the health of the server, and monitor server settings such as upgrades, remote administration etc.

Again – you do not need to have Connector installed on a PC on your network IF you simply want to access a shared folder on the WHS.

As I mentioned in Part 1, WHS comes in three discs. They are:

• Windows Home Server Installation DVD – use this DVD to install Windows Home Server on a computer
• Windows Home Server Connector Software CD – use this CD to install the Windows Home Server Connector Software
• Windows Home Server Home Computer Restore CD – use this CD to restore a home computer from a backup located on a Windows Home Server

You can also install the WHS Connector Software via the WHS system. Your WHS system will have a shared folder called “Software” where you will find three subdirectories initially setup. These include:

• “Add-ins” – This directory is used to install third party add-in software on a Windows Home Server system
• “Home PC Restore CD” - This directory contains the image CD that can be used to restore a backup to a PC
• “Home Server Connector Software” – This directory contains the Connector software

Let’s quickly run through the Windows Home Server Connector software setup process.

Here are the contents to the Home Server Connector Software:

Windows Home Server Connector software is installed on any computer that you want WHS to monitor and backup. For my test setup, I am running Connector on an older IBM ThinkPad notebook. Doubleclick on the “setup” executable and you’ll see the following dialog box.

Setup is painless – just agree to the EULA and watch it go.

Before the setup is finished, Connector will ask you for the Windows Home Server administrator password.

Once the password is provided, your computer will be added to Windows Home Server. Computer backup is initially configured for the system also.

 

  

That’s it!

Windows Home Server Connector up and running…

Once you have Windows Home Server Connector installed on your PC, you’ll see the Windows Home Server tray icon added to your system task tray as shown here:

The WHS tray icon shows you the current health and status of Windows Home Server as well as your connected home computers. According to Microsoft, this icon includes notifications about:

• User account password mismatches
• Software upgrades
• Backup status

Right click the tray icon and you’ll quickly gain access to the Windows Home Server Connector software.

Here are the five colors to the WHS tray icon:

 This indicates a healthy network

 This indicates that you have an issue that you should attend to soon

 This indicates you have an issue or a set of issues you must attend to immediately

 This means a backup is in progress

This means your computer can not contact Windows Home Server

Since this was the first system that I installed the Windows Home Server Connector software on (and I hadn’t looked at my WHS in several weeks), I had to address several issues right from the get go. 

The initial issues that I ran into included:

• Setting up a user account that matches the user account on my computer (notice the balloon warning that says Windows Home Server does not recognize your user account)
• Updating my malware protection (anti-virus and spyware software needed updates on my computer)
• Installing the latest updates on Windows Home Server

The third bullet is an important aspect to Windows Home Server. It alludes to the remote administration capabilities of the Windows Home Server Connector software. As I mentioned in Part 1, once you have WHS installed, you can disconnect your monitor, keyboard, and mouse because you won’t (ideally) be needing them anymore.

In order to remotely administer the Windows Home Server, you need to kick off the Windows Home Server Console. You can either doubleclick the system tray icon or you can right click the icon and select the Console from there. Once you do this, you’ll see the following show up on your screen:

In order to administer the Windows Home Server from the Console, you’ll need to know the administrator password to the machine. Enter it here and you’ll enter the Console. The WHS Console allows you to access the following major topics:

• Computers and Backup – see the PCs connected to WHS. Monitor the health of the PCs and administer backups
• User Accounts – administer user accounts on WHS
• Shared Folders – administer shared folders and user rights for folders stored on WHS
• Server Storage – administer the hard drives on the WHS
• Network Status – check the current status of the Windows Home Server network
• Settings – administer Windows Home Server

Computers and Backup

One of the key features of Windows Home Server is the ability for the system to remotely monitor and backup the computers on the home network. When you click on the “Computers & Backup” tab from within the WHS Console, you’ll see all the systems with Windows Home Server Connector software installed. Each connected PC will have their current state displayed here. The snapshot shown here displays only one system which happens to be my guinea pig notebook. Now if you did have multiple systems here, you would select a system you want to work with and then click on one of the various buttons above in the toolbar.

The toolbar has the following buttons:

• View backups
• Backup Now
• Configure Backup
• Remove Computer

Select “View backups” and you’ll see a list of backups made of the system (which there are none at this time)

You can select “Backup Now” to manually backup your computer to Windows Home Server at this moment in time. I’ll go ahead and show you in action with my notebook system.

Once you’ve clicked on “Backup Now”, you’re asked to provide a name to the backup. Select “Backup Now” to begin the remote backup. Your system tray will notify you that a backup has begun:

and that’s it – backup is working in the background. If you visit the Windows Home Server Console, you’ll see the status of the remote backup which is currently at six percent. Note – I’m backing up this notebook of mine over a wireless network.

You can also see your progress by hovering over the tray icon:

Windows Home Server took approximately 4+ hours to back up my entire notebook system over a wireless connection for the very first time. Subsequent backups are much faster since they’re incremental backups. Note – my test notebook is extremely bare – with only 14GB of disk space consumed. This translates to roughly 6.2 GB of space consumed on WHS for backup purposes.

I can now go back to the WHS Console, select the backed up computer and view the backup.

Here you’ll see the backup I just manually performed. Click on the details button and you’ll get additional information.

You can select the backup and even open it up to restore specific files or directories. The first time this is done, a device driver is installed on the PC which allows the opened backup image to appear as a mounted network drive.  Here’s the opened backup mounted automatically as drive Z. Notice how the drive looks like any other drive under Windows Explorer.

If you want to pre-configure your notebooks for automatic backup, you can select the “Configure Backup” button on the toolbar. This will bring up the following wizard driven interface.

Click next, and WHS will collect information about the selected computer on the network:

You’ll see the drives that WHS can back up. Note – it can only back up NTFS drives – No FAT32 formatted drives. WHS will then display the folders that will not be backed up.

The configured backup will take place between 12am and 6am (You can modify this within the Settings section). The final confirmation dialog box looks as follows:

User Accounts

If this is the very first time you’re installing Windows Home Server Connector software on a PC, then chances are, there are no additional user accounts on the Windows Home Server other than the administrator and the Guest account. To get things going, we will need to create an account that ideally matches the account on the computer that has Windows Home Server Connector software installed. It’s best that the username and the passwords match so you don’t have to provide the passwords when you’re trying to access a folder on WHS but it’s really up to you.

To add a new user, click on the “Add” button in the toolbar. You’re then presented with the following dialog box.

If you want to allow this user to remotely access the Windows Home Server over the Internet, then check off the “Enable Remote Access for this user”. More on remote access later on.

The next step is to pick a password for the user.

Finally, you need to assign user rights to the shared folders on Windows Home Server. The new user can either have Full, Read, or No access to each shared folder on the server.

WHS will display the following dialog after you click ”Finish”.

   

Shared Folders

For those of you new to the concept of file servers – the “Shared Folders” is essentially the heart of Windows Home Server. It is through this feature that allows you to centrally store files on the WHS. Files stored here can then be accessed by any networked PC and even over the Internet.

Click on the “Shared Folders” tab and you’ll see all the folders available on the Windows Home Server. WHS creates a set of default shared folders including:

• Music
• Photos
• Public
• Software
• Videos

Every user created within WHS also gets their own folder with their login name associated to it. These user folders are located under “Users”. The top row of buttons allows you to perform various actions related to shared folders. You can either:

• “Add” new shared folders
• Select an existing folder and bring up the “Properties”
• Select an existing folder and “Open” the folder
• Select an existing folder and “Remove” the folder

All shared folders can be seen within Windows Networking. You can browse to the shared folder within Windows Explorer or you can directly access the shared folder via the UNC notation (\\<WHS name>\<shared folder name>). If you’re familiar with mapping network drives, you can map the shared folder on the Windows Home Server to your PC. Under Windows Vista, you simply right click the Computer icon within Windows Explorer. Select “Map Network Drive” and map the UNC path to an available drive letter.

In order to see the contents of a shared folder, you need to know the user credentials for that folder. If your current login and password on your system matches the users’ credentials on WHS for a folder, you will have immediate access to that folder. Note – as I said earlier, you do not need to have Windows Home Server Connector software installed to access a shared folder on a Windows Home Server. You just need to know the user credentials (user account and password) to get to the share.

If you look closely at the snapshots – you’ll see a column called “Duplication”. Windows Home Server is capable of creating duplicate copies of your data for backup purposes – in case a hard drive fails on the WHS. The column shows that all of the folders are “off” for “Duplication”. The reason for this is simple. In order for file duplication to take place, you need at least two hard drives within a Windows Home Server. My initial WHS setup only had one hard drive installed but we’ll test out additional drive support later on.

If you want to add a new shared folder on the WHS, simply click on “Add” and you’ll see the following dialog box:

I’ll go ahead and create a folder for Krunker:

The next step is to assign user rights to the folder. Just as before, rights for each user are either “Full”, “Read”, or “None”

Click on ”Finish” and you’re done!

You can assign user rights for any folder at any time via the Windows Home Server Console. Simply select the folder and click on Properties in the toolbar. You can also right click a folder and select “Properties”.

  

Server Storage

The Server Storage tab displays all the hard drives installed on your Windows Home Server. The drives are listed on the left hand side and a pie chart is shown on the right displaying a breakdown of disk space allocations.

From here, you can “add”, “repair”, or “remove” drives from the server. Since I only have a single hard drive installed in this server, there isn’t a whole lot I can do at this time.

Network Status

The Network Status icon will show you the current health of the network - which includes information relevant to your PC. If your connected PC has out of date virus definitions or your spyware is out of date, then WHS will inform you of such remotely. If WHS needs software updates to be applied, you’ll also see this here.

As I mentioned earlier, it’s been many weeks since I installed WHS so there were several new updates for me to apply. You can remotely install the updates from within the Connector Console.

Once I opted to install the updates, I get the following screen shot (basically the old Windows XP update dialog boxes)

 

Settings

Windows Home Server Settings can be accessed by clicking on the “Settings” button on the upper right hand corner. Once you select it, you’ll see the following dialog box.

You can configure the following setting categories:

• General
• Backup
• Passwords
• Media Sharing
• Remote Access
• Add-ins
• Resources

Settings – General

Under the “General” category, you can modify the date and time, the language selection (default to English), Windows Update settings, whether you want to be a part of the Customer Experience Improvement program, and whether you want Windows Error Reporting turned on.

Settings – Backup

Under the “Backup” category, you can modify the start and end time for backing up computers on the network. You can also specify how long you want to keep the three different kinds of backups that WHS will perform (monthly, weekly, and daily).

Finally, you can manually perform backup cleaning through this interface.

Settings – Passwords

Under the “Passwords” category, you can change the home server password and modify the user accounts password policy. The user accounts password policy allows you to set how strong or weak user passwords should be on Windows Home Server.

Settings – Media Sharing

The “Media Sharing” category allows you to turn on or off the media sharing capabilities of the Windows Home Server. You can select to turn on/off streaming of Music, Photos, and Videos individually (the default settings are all off initially).  If you turn it on, devices on your network can stream the digital media content from the WHS. This is basically equivalent to Windows Media Connect under Windows Media Player.

This is particularly important for devices like Microsoft Xbox 360. Turn on sharing of these folders, and the Xbox 360 will be able to stream media directly from your Windows Home Server.

Settings - Remote Access

Once of the neat features of Windows Home Server is remote access. If you enabled Remote Access on WHS,  you can setup WHS and your home computers to be remotely accessible from the Internet. This isn’t necessarily for the faint of heart but it’s not the hardest thing to do either.

To get remote access working, you simply select the “Settings” tab on the upper right corner of the Windows Home Server Console. This will bring up the following dialog box:

Select the “Remote Access” option on the left and do the following:

• Make sure “Web sites is turned on”
• Configure your router – it’s best if your router supports UPnP because Windows Home Server can automatically configure the router without any user intervention. WHS is basically port forwarding to the local IP address of WHS

Here’s the router configuration process. You simply select “setup” and then you’ll see the following dialog box.

Since my router supports UPnP, configuration was automatic. You can click on “Details” to see what actually happens behind the scenes. Here are snapshots of the setup process:

And that’s it! We’re done with router configuration.  

• Configure a domain name. You don’t necessarily have to do this - You can always access the Windows Home Server remotely by IP address IF you know the IP address assigned by your ISP.

If you do want to setup a domain name, it’s actually an extremely easy process. Microsoft supplies a domain called “livenode.com” where you can register your Windows Home Server onto. Your job is to simply select a unique subdomain on livenode.com.

To setup a domain name, you need to have a Windows Live account.  Here’s the initial dialog box.

You’re now asked to enter your Live account information:

Here’s the privacy policy and custom domains addendum:

You then select a subdomain name for the “livenode.com” domain. Select “confirm” to make sure the subdomain is available.

Once you’ve confirmed the availability of your subdomain, click on “Finish” and you’re all set:

We’re now able to go to the provided URL and remotely connect to our Windows Home Server. You can even remotely administer WHS or some of your Windows based computers at home. Unfortunately remote administration of computers on your network will only work with the following operating systems

• Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2
• Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005
• Windows XP Tablet PC Edition with SP2
• Windows Vista Ultimate, Vista Business, or Vista Enterprise

Surprisingly, Windows Home Server does not let you remotely administer PC’s with Windows Vista Home Premium which is the predominant version available on most PC’s purchased today. That’s a bit odd don’t you think? Either Microsoft doesn’t want users of Home Premium to remotely administer their machine via WHS OR they purposely want you to upgrade to Windows Vista Ultimate.

Here’s a quick run-through of the web interface to the Windows Home Server. Again, if you know your Internet IP address, you can always enter the IP address directly in your browser’s address bar. Alternatively, you can enter the URL assigned to you during the Remote Access setup procedures. You’ll get a subdomain off of the livenode.com website.

Once you go to the website, you can login with your user account. You can not log in with the Administrator account via the web. You can however, login with your regular user account and then remote administer the Windows Home Server – assuming you know the administrator password.

You can use Firefox or Internet Explorer to gain access to your Windows Home Server over the web. If you want to remotely administer any computer on the network or the Windows Home Server, you’ll need Internet Explorer.

Here’s what  the site looks like when you first go to the URL:

Log into the website by clicking on the “Log On” button on the upper right hand corner.

Once you’re logged in, you’ll see the following display under Internet Explorer. (You won’t see the “Computers” tab within Firefox).

There are three tabs available under IE – “Home”, “Computers”, and “Shared Folders”.

The Computers tab will allow you to perform remote administration of your PCs at home including the WHS. The “Shared Folders” tab allows you to access the shared folders you have rights to right over the Internet – as if you were at home.

Click on the ”Computers” tab and you’ll see options to remote access either the Windows Home Server or Windows computers on your home network. Note – you can only remote administer certain Windows systems. My notebook is listed here but I can not remote administer it because it runs Windows Vista Home Premium.

Let’s access the Windows Home Server over the web. Simply click on the link “Connect to your Home Server” and you’ll be asked for the administrator password to the WHS:

You might be asked to add the URL to your Trusted Sites list within Internet Explorer in order to proceed. Once you’re logged in, you’ll see the same Windows Home Server Console interface – this time over the web. You can perform the same operations you would otherwise perform at home.

 

You can also retrieve all of your files stored on the shared folders simply by clicking on the third tab labeled “Shared Folders”.

You’ll see a list of all the shared folders that are accessible by your account. Let’s click into the “Music” folder:

From here, you can see all the files and subdirectories underneath the shared “Music” folder. You can navigate back up a directory, create a new directory, download a file, upload a file, and rename a file. There’s even a search interface allowing you to look for a file stored on the server.

Here there’s a single “New Order” directory within the Music folder. If I click down into one of the albums, I’ll see all the files stored in the directory. Click on a file and you can instantly download the file wherever you are on the net.

Settings – Add-ins

The “Add-ins” category allows you to manage any additional add-ins that you might have installed or want to install on your WHS. Add-ins can be installed by copying the appropriate “msi” installer to the Add-ins folder under the “Software” shared folder.

Settings – Resources

The “Resources” category under Settings gives you a high level overview of the server configuration, and the Windows Home Server version information.

Summary

In this article, we’ve focused on the client side of Windows Home Server via the Windows Home Server Connector software application. We’ve shown you:

• How to install Connector
• How to backup your computer
• How to add users
• How to access shared folders and files
• How to maintain Windows Home Server
• How to connect to your Windows Home Server over the web

Windows Home Server is much more than a centralized file server for the home environment. Home Server gives you the ability to centrally monitor and maintain the health of multiple PCs on your network. It gives you a way to access your data – whether on different systems at home or remotely over the Internet. It provides the power of a centralized file server yet is so easy, nearly anyone can administer and maintain it. Amazingly enough, WHS is certainly shaping up to be a great product. Were it not for the lack of remote desktop support for Windows Vista Home Premium machines, then I would give the product straight A’s.. but alas, there are still minor issues to overcome but I’ll go into that down the road.

Stay tuned for additional articles over the next few weeks as I try to dig into more specific features of WHS. Hopefully this has helped you gain further insight into how you can centrally manage your data in your home network using Windows Home Server.

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