WHS worked first time!!!!

[davidmat]

Instead of putting the old media centre to pasture I thought I'd give WHS a go, read up a little first and grabbed my copy Wednesday. In less than 2 hours had a Home Server box running and three home PCs backed up. The greatest part was the remote server wizard. All I did was press OK and WOW! green ticks all the way. No sacrificial chickens were needed to appease the computer gods in the process either.
with the remote access, I'm guessing that my net gear router that had Upnp enabled certainly made my life easier. I'm using optus cable for my broadband, from experience adsl sucks big time, at my factory and at home. Using older gear also helped, my mobo is an asus A8n5x with nvidia drivers and a wimpy amd 3500 athlon so no real driver issues. I must admit though that I'm not pushing the server much and keeping it's role fairly simple, shared files and backup only. my vist media centre in the lounge acts the part of media server and that's working alright for me. Praying to god that all stays good.

[Mike]

Congratulations! Isn't it nice when it all comes together as it should!

Originally Posted by davidmat

I must admit though that I'm not pushing the server much and keeping it's role fairly simple, shared files and backup only.

LOL - I wonder how long that will last - bet you start saving up for some big HDDs soon

[krypto]

I had the same experience. Much less pain than VMC. Just be carefull if you ever want to change the system disk. I had major problems when I upgraded from 200gb to 500gb.

There are a couple of useful addins that I use:
- disk management
- Admin console

[davidmat]

Originally Posted by Mike

LOL - I wonder how long that will last - bet you start saving up for some big HDDs soon

must admit, Mike that the thought has crossed my mind. WAF dictates I should get it through my company, where in theory I'm in control, but I'll have to get it past my financial officer who happens to be mum!.

thanks for the heads up Krypto I'll definitely look into those addins. I'm fairly sure I read about your experiences and made sure I had other back up images, just in case,

[bodogbodog]

Originally Posted by davidmat

Praying to god that all stays good.

Good to hear you got up and running without any problems

You haven't mentioned what sort of disk config you have in the system so I just want to make sure you are aware of the Data Corruption bug in multi disk systems - have a read of the KB article - it doesn't happen often but hate to see you caught out

[Raptor]

Originally Posted by krypto

Just be carefull if you ever want to change the system disk. I had major problems when I upgraded from 200gb to 500gb.

Hi Krypto

You will have to pardon my ignorance, but why would upgrade the system disk from 200GB at all? Is the remaining 180GB not enough for tombstones and the other little bits and pieces?

[bodogbodog]

Originally Posted by Raptor

Hi Krypto

You will have to pardon my ignorance, but why would upgrade the system disk from 200GB at all?

Microsoft's recomendation and best practice is to make the system disk as big as possible - ie the largest disk on the system - the process of "Buffering" data movement is limited by the available of free space on that disk - it will use as much as it can get - less means longer time to do things in terms of balancing storage/adding & removing disks

Changing your system disk is not that hard - basically you loose the operating system and add-in's - you just need to re-establish the links to client PC's and shared drives once you'll reinstalled (not new installed!) the WHS OS

[krypto]

Originally Posted by Raptor

Hi Krypto

You will have to pardon my ignorance, but why would upgrade the system disk from 200GB at all? Is the remaining 180GB not enough for tombstones and the other little bits and pieces?

When I went to add another HDD I read in the WHS forums that you should have the largest disk as the system disk because this is used a s a scratch disk. In any case my 200gb was quite old.

What I discovered after much grieve is that you can simply clone the whole primary disk onto a bigger disk using Acronis, being careful to leave the system partition at 20gb.

Using the standard WHS specified process for replacing the system disk loses all your backups, settings and add-ins, and takes a very long time.

Incidentally I have thrown all my old HDDs into my WHS and I am currently running 9 HDDs for 2.2tb

[Raptor]

Ahh, and the smoke clears.

Thanks fellas.