Paul's esoteric meanderings

When I first heard about Windows Home Server (WHS) – I was pretty reluctant to bother. I was happily running Server 2003 with a 1.5TB software RAID 5 array and am not a fan of NAS, so didn’t get the point.

With the release of Power Pack 1 (PP1), and support for external USB backups, I decided to take another look. I have not looked back.

OK – at it’s simplest WHS does three things

1. It backs up all your home PC’s using what has to be one of the most innovative and useful backup solutions I have ever seen.
2. It’s a file server
3. It’s a Terminal Services & Web Gateway – you can get access to your desktop PC’s and Files from the Web

WHS is managed by a really easy to use interface – it’s not a web interface, it’s actually a Terminal Services Published App. Anyone with a modicum of IT knowledge can drive this thing.

The hardware can be any old PC with more than 512MB of RAM. I run 4GB so I can use VMWare are well for testing. It will need a few HDD’s, either internal or external, USB, PATA, SATA, eSata, it doesn’t matter. They can be any size and speed, it will sort out the storage. Ideally there are four HDD’s, one for Boot / Temp, two for storage with duplication between them, and an external USB/eSATA for backup. I’m using a WD 1TB Mybook Essential for backup as unlike many enclosures, it will spin down saving power, and has no fans making noise. I’m running 1 x 80Gb, 4 x 500Gb, 1 x 1TB USB.

Install

Installing and setting up the WHS is pretty simple. I had one weird error that caused it to fail due to it not liking the PATA setup on my M/B. Changing the DVD to it’s own controller solved that.

There is one strange requirement, that is the server must be plugged into an Ethernet interface, not wireless. It’s something to do with the compression algorithm and streaming of the backups. It’s documented, but I haven’t found the solid reason yet. The clients can be wireless, but not the server.

Next step is to configure any storage. Plenty of guides on that around. The very interesting technical brief / whitepaper on WHS Storage is here. It must be noted that WHS does NOT support RAID. You can run hardware RAID, but it’s not recommended. Please read the whitepaper to gain a better understanding. Basically any of the file shares can have “duplication” enabled. Initially to me this sounded like a mirror (RAID1), and as I was running RAID5, I wasn’t particularly interested. After reading the whitepaper, it is fundamentally different. Not better or worse, just different. I would kinda still prefer RAID5 – it’s more efficient, and protects the whole system, not just the file stores, but this is much easier to expand and configure. I’m neutral on this feature vs RAID5, but would be very happy to give it to a non IT person to run. I think that’s the main point, anyone could drive this and have their data protected. It does NOT protect the WHS OS in any way. It does not duplicate the PC Backups unless you hack it.

Once the server is setup and configured with storage you install the WHS connector on each PC in your house. There is a tray icon that will run on each PC in your house – it alerts you to any problems, provides shortcuts to the file shares, manages backups and allows you to manage the WHS. It makes it much easier to trust the status of the server than having to remember and check Event Logs every so often.

Backups

The backup function is split into two components. PC backup and File Server backup. The technical brief for the PC Backup is here

PC Backups

The PC backup runs once a day, waking the computers from sleep, and putting them back to sleep when complete. The backups are particularly clever, tracking each NTFS sector backed up. If any sectors are the same, either across backups of the same machine, or between machines, the sector is only stored once. This is all transparent to the user. The space saving is dramatic. My three computers at home are using 168GB backup space, and that is with plenty of data on each, and nightly backups for a month. The backups are cleaned up to manage space on a schedule you can define.

Restoring of PC Backup’s can be done in one of two ways. You can browse the backups to restore individual files, or you restore the whole machine like an image. The restore is particularly clever. You boot the PC from a generic “Restore CD” that comes with WHS. All the drivers for that PC are sitting in a folder on the WHS ready to go – it has automatically found them on the PC when it was backed up and prepared them for this purpose. They go onto a USB thumb drive. With the drivers available, the PC can get onto the local network, connect to the server and retrieve the backup. It will put all the files back, OS and all – presto – rebuilt client PC from backup. That is much easier than the usual “restore the OS first”. Unlike most Bare Metal or Image restores, there is no need to keep regular updated images, meaning less maintenance and less space consumed. It’s very elegant really.

Server Backups

The server backup can backup any of the file shares (not the Server OS or the PC backups) to any HDD in the “Backup Storage” list. The server backup must be triggered manually, it cannot be scheduled or automated (A glaring oversight). It uses NTFS Hard Links to make sure that any file is only stored once, even though it may appear to be copied up each time. This saves huge amounts of space, and can be read on any machine. Again – this is transparent to the user. The external backups must be cleaned up manually when you run out of space. It would be ideal in future versions if these external backups could be duplicated somehow, to allow for an offsite copy. The current solution would be to perform the backup twice. This is not a significant overhead, as the backup only copies any changed data using a very efficient algorithm.

Storage / Shares

The other function for a WHS box by default is as a local file server. It is very easy for anyone to configure this, and can be controlled with easy to manage user accounts and permissions.
The interesting feature in this area is “Duplication”. Each share can optionally have “Duplication” enabled. This will then have the server transparently copy each file to a separate drive. The process is described in the storage whitepaper. This is all hidden from the user by using NTFS links and other NTFS trickery. The advantage is that in the event of a disaster of some kind, the drives are fully readable on any machine. It also is dynamic enough that the drives can be any type  and size, it will share the data round and balance the storage as required.

Web Gateway

I haven’t played much in this area yet – I’ll update when I do. It uses UPNP to publish a site to the internet through your router. The domain homeserver.com lets you register a free subdomain to get to your data. You can access your files from anywhere. There is a Terminal Services Gateway function to allow remote access to your home PC’s – I haven’t investigated this yet. It probably depends on your desktop OS version, user account configuration and if the computer is asleep.

Add In’s

There are a reasonable and expanding number of AddIns that can be installed. These offer increased functionality through the WHS interface.

Notes

It is worth checking the Power Settings on the WHS, as mine was set not to spin the drives down. This wastes a lot of power and will reduce their life. I tend to set mine to 5 minute spin down, as this is longer than any streaming period. The machine isn’t user interactive – so spin up time is not a concern.

Non-WHS Apps

WHS is actually Windows Server 2003 (possibly with some SBS stuff – I have noted). It will run nearly anything W2K3 Svr will. BUT, you need to be particularly careful with your drive management. Use of Disk Manager can kill the special WHS stores. Whatever apps you install needs some careful thought as to where the data will be stored.

Conclusion

I’m very impressed with the data storage and backup solution used in WHS. It can be driven by anyone with a modicum of computer experience and meets it’s goals very well. It is more limited than a full W2K3 server, but offers some brilliant functions that are difficult to find elsewhere. It’s simplicity is wonderful, and with some care, offers a wonderful solution.

The Future

What should have been included that wasn’t? Hmm, well. I have a list, as do many others on the Connect forum. If I had to narrow it down it would be.

1. WHS + Media Centre in one – so you can just run extenders around your house.
2. Scheduled External Server Backups
3. OS Backups
4. A 2W Atom CPU / MB & 95% efficient CPU – drop the consumption from the 30w idle of my Home Server
5. Better power options. It would be good to have the box sleep for much of the day, waking only to do what was needed when we were home.

Good Resources

http://www.wegotserved.co.uk/
http://blogs.technet.com/homeserver/

 

Speed, I need speed, and speed with coverage would be good. I was using a Netgear DG834G previously, and had a pretty good run out of it. I know Netgear kit ain’t the best, but it beats DLink in my experience, and is probably the biggest selling home and SOHO kit in Australia.

Now for 802.11g, MIMO will improve your coverage, but seeing as N is just around the corner, and uses MIMO as part of the draft standard, it made sense to just jump to 802.11n. My house is two storey, and getting good reliable coverage over both floors has proved difficult. I always get a signal, but not a good one, and for streaming my Vista Media Centre from my Home Server, I needed a good signal. I could have run Cat5, it’s what I had done in the past, but I figure, in 2008, I should be able to make all this new fangled stuff kinda come together smoothly.

Just released by Netgear and Linksys amongst others are new Dual Band draft N equipment, this runs in both the 5.8Ghz and 2.4GHz ranges. The argument being that the 5.8GHz range is far larger in frequency space, and far less utilised by other things that can interfere. Made sense to me, and at a small price premium, was worth jumping onto. Teamed with a new naked ADSL2+ service, I figured I would “embrace the future”.

The new Netgear model is WNDR3300 and the Linksys a WRT600N. I was more familiar with Netgear, it’s cheaper, and more easily available in Australia. I teamed it up with a set of Netgear USB WNDA3100 adapters. The unit supports QoS for my new Naked ADSL w/ VOIP service and has the widest range of features of the current netgear lineup.

8 Weeks after ordering, the kit finally turned up, with delays from Netgear getting it into the country. Looks like this stuff really is new – oh bugger, that’ll mean bugs.

It looks the piece, big, black, no antennas thanks to the secret metamaterial. The power pack is switch mode and small, and it comes with a few cables. Inital setup is manageable. The flashy lights on top are very very irritating, allow an extra $2 for a roll of black tape.

The first problem was the Router doesn’t have an integrated ADSL modem. Guess I should have read the specs a little better there. It’s almost impossible to purchase an ADSL modem only unit in Australia today, everything wants to route. Two routers in series = problems. You can convert the DG834G into a modem, but I had another home for mine, so I bought a DM111P to run as an Ethernet to ADSL2+ bridge. Getting the DM111P to be a modem means putting it into “RFC2684” mode, something not covered in any of the docs.  This way the DM111P handles the ADSL settings, but the WNDR3300 does the ADSL PPOE login with credentials etc. The downside is that you can’t see your ADSL line connection performance figures, and whilst the DM111P is in bridge mode, it doesn’t have an IP address, so you can’t get information off of it either. You have to configure your WNDR3300 to login with “Other” and not “PPTP” or “Telstra Bigpond”. Either way, I’m getting about 7Mbit.

Once running and configured I fired up the WNDA3100 units in my partners desktop and the Media Centre. Install went OK, although I hate the “app” type driver installs. I much prefer just having the driver and managing it through windows. I figured being new, that doing it the “right” way with the vendor, and having additional signal information would be useful. Longer term, once smoothed out, I’ll be uninstalling the netgear apps and just running the driver. That said, I have to figure out how to extract it, as it’s all packaged up, and not easy to get into. Finally, there is some sort of script it runs on every login, looks dodgy to me.

The coverage is good, and speed ok. Plenty of other reviews there, no need to re-cover that. Interestingly most of the clients could only see the 2.4Ghz signal. The 5.8 signal gets wiped out by my walls too quickly. As this review covers, you can only have DraftN on either 5.8 OR 2.4 at once, so I dropped the 5.8 signal and got the speed where I could. That pretty well negates the point of having Dual Band.

The comments I have had so far are below

1. Integrated WNDA3100 drivers mean more junk running
2. The pretty blue flashing ultrabright LEDS on the router are really really irritating, and there is no “off” option. (Update – press the dome over the lights – they turn off)
3. The router firmware is very flaky. It drops wireless signal every so often. (Seems better now)
4. The WNDA3100 drivers are less than ideal – more work needed here to improve performance.
5. My 802.11a/b/g laptop only wanted to see the 5.8 signal, not the 2.4, until I turned off the 5.8 on the router totally.
6. My HP printer wouldn’t work with WPA2, I had to turn on WPA/WPA2 compatibility mode.
7. If running in 2.4/5.8 Dual band mode, you get the option to run two different SSID’s. If you run the same one, your client can be confused as to which one to use. There is no guidance I have found on this function anywhere, and I’m still confused. Caused me some grief, until I made them different, at which stage the WPS auto config function stops working properly.
8. My Outlook w/ RPC over HTTP refused to work until I upgraded to the Beta firmware. (Fixed now)
9. Netgear has a Beta program going for firmware and some decent forums
10. There is discussion of other USB NIC vendors with the same Atheros chipset having performance issues.
11. The modem and power adapters all produce a bit of heat, meaning they are not particularly efficient. I am trying to cut my power use.
12. The DM111P comes with an old style power brick, whereas the WNDR3300 has a much smaller and more efficient switch mode power adapter. C’mon Netgear, catch up.
13. Coverage is much better
14. Speed is much better
15. No driver support for the WNDA3100 and Server 2003. I haven’t done video tests yet until I get a NIC for the server.

Next time I think I would consider the DG834N with the integrated modem, unless I had spectrum issues, possibly in densely populated areas.

Update (31/07/08)
I have updated to the latest release firmware – this has helped the stability significantly. Coverage is still ok, but not excellent. Primarily, I still can’t reliably watch DivX/XVid movies on my Vista Media Centre PC from my Windows Home Server. They play, but often judders and stall. The signal strength an quality are about 70% – but it still doesn’t cope. I think I’ll have to run Cat5 to the Media Centre after all. The Home Server is already running Cat 5 to the WNDR3300 – that is a requirement of WHS.  My house is two storey timber and no too huge. Due to placement, some transmission paths are less than ideal – high angle to the walls / floors increasing apparent depth.

 
Router

Router w/ VOIP adapter from Internode

 
Router, VOIP & ADSL Modem

WNDA3100

UPDATE:
I have decided to ditch the WNDR3300 and replace is with *something* else. I ahve gone through 5 versions of the firmware since I bought it. The 5.8Ghz is a waste of time, it has very poor penetration. www.smallnetbuilder.com shows average-poor wireless performacne in comparison from other devices. THe unit was replaced under warranty a couple of weeks ago when the QoS rules would not remain set to custom.

 The final deal breaker was my VOIP phone dropouts. I have an OPEN networks VOIP ATA behind the router, and frequently get “one way voice” on a call. I put this down to VOIP issues. Whilst the router was away under warranty I used my old DG834G – and had NO call dropouts. It doesn’t even have QoS and the call quality was better. As soon as the WNDR3300 went back in – dropouts came back. It’s going to be replaced, this time with somethign with an integrated ADSL modem.

I would not recommend this device.