Windows Home Server

[ninjaman001]

Anyone here tested the Windows Home Server? I'm thinking about building one and I am wondering if this is worth it? Or should I build a home media server with Windows Server 2003? Not sure what one has that the other one doesn't. I'm curious because I may be able to develop a niche and provide media center users with a home media server. I've noticed a potential market for this in this area, and I want to test drive one to make sure I know the ins and outs of it.

 

[The Goatboy]

I was a part of the beta for home server; after loading it I never played with it which kind of defeats the purpose I guess....by anyway, MS did say they would sell OEM versions. when it's released, you should be able to buy the OS and install it on your barebone machines. the deal with home server though is you don't really log into that machine it runs on, it is actually supposed to run headless and you install a client on any other PC you want to connect to it for accessing music, pictures, movies, etc.. I don't know how well this will be received by new users, who will expect to sit infront of these machines and play with them; if that's what the end user wants, then I recommend a PC with Media Center Edition on it and not Server 2003. Even though Home Server is based on Server 2003, MS has added new features you can't/won't see in the plain old server 2k3 OS; driver support is lacking for server 2k3 because it's not meant to do anything other than business related activities - not entertainment type tasks. I'm starting to ramble so I'll wrap it up; use Home Server if you like, but do some research. your other alternative is the Media Center OS (which under Vista is Home Premium now), and not server 2k3 OS. any other questions let us know. good luck.

 

[Blues]

I think what he is looking to do is make a centralized storage more then something that actually does the playback. If that is the case there is a wide varity of options. For a media center that will store and playback the media Windows XP MCE or Windows Vista Home Premium would be the best bets. There are also networking solutions that stream the data off a PC on the network and output to a TV and/or Reciever I think Netgear has one that does HD support.

 

[greggh]

HomeServer is already released. I have a test network setup here at our offices that I am going to use next week to train all of our field techs.

You can get it at newegg right now (or from an oem.) We have 10 copies in stock.

As for what it does, it does very well. I put it through its paces and it does everything I actually would want it to do. Central user management, good storage system, media sharing to any devices that actually support it, and the big one is that it keeps windows xp and vista machines networked and healthy. By that I mean it actually finds bugs in the configuration that would not allow it to connect and use the windows/cifs/samba shares and fixes them. So if the user messes up his network config, on next reboot it tries to fix the problems. A lot of the calls we go on are "I cant print to my printer through the network" or "I cant get to the files on that other computer in my house anymore!". This does a real good job of solving that.

I am no microsoft fanboy, in fact I run linux on nearly everything of mine. But HomeServer is actually really nice.

 

[The Goatboy]

didn't realize it was out already; thanks for the headsup greggh. I'll have to check it out on newegg now that you sparked my interest...lol.