Well I installed Windows Home Server Beta 2 on an older machine at home and things went pretty smoothly. Some things I did notice...
There were a LOT of reboots - Beta software <shrug />
The only hardware not accounted for was the AC'97 onboard sound system. This was quite weird as the found-new-hardware dialog came up and behaved as if possessed. It took me a little while to realise that this thing was being controlled through some sort of scripting (sendKeys?) and the best I could do was to stop trying to help :-|
I was able to download the AC'97 drivers/codecs from Realtek and they installed easily using the handy Device Manager icon on the Server desktop.
Changing system settings on Windows Home Server is NOT recommended but, as I was already there and had minimised the dire-warning-window, I went ahead and did it anyway.
I needed to change the time-zone and locality settings so that the damn thing believed it was in Australia instead of the U.S.A. Later I found that the Home Server Client Console allows this change by clicking the little gears in the top right corner. I think this second change prompted the system to believe that I was trying to do something naughty and my days-to-activate dropped to zero. (I'm going to check this out and submit a bug report if I can duplicate it.)
I wandered upstairs and dropped the Client Connector CD into my Vista laptop and installed the client without any problems. Logging on reminded me that I had to add my user account details.
My frankenmachine only has a small primary drive and I have yet to purchase some serious storage for it so the next thing I did was disable back-up for the laptop. I'm now going to add the other PCs in the house, disable back-up for each, add user accounts and let the thing run until the week-end before starting all over again. Later I'll add more storage, enable back-ups one-at-a-time so as to not overload my little wireless network and figure how to pinhole my ADSL modem to allow remote access to the server.
All-in-all it was a pretty painless experience and much smoother than I expected it to be. I'm sure that there will be issues as I ramp-up the load but, for now, I'm impressed.
Here's the specs on the pretty low-end machine that is my Windows Home Server:-
- Microsoft Windows Home Server Service Pack 2, v.2825
- Gigabyte GA-7VT600 motherboard
- VIA KT600/VT8237 chipset
- AMD Athlon(tm) XP 2000+ 1.67GHz CPU
- 512MB of RAM
- Realtek RTL8029 NIC (3rd-hand unit and at only 10Mbps I'm gonna' have to upgrade this one!)
- 40GB Seagate Barracuda ST340014A 7200rpm HDD - 37.27(real)GB with 26.8GB free (ditto!)
So it seems Windows Home Server is installable on a machine that does not even meet some of the minimum specs required ;-)
Next steps:-
- Faster NIC
- More storage
- External connectivity
- Test the back-up and media sharing features
- Look for some 3rd party add-on services
This looks like it could be a lot of FUN!
Cheers,
Neale