moomalade

At home one of my desktop PC’s developed a bit of a cough. I say cough but I mean a voilent hard disk grating noise. While I could have fixed the problem with two shiny new hard drives, I thought it would be much more fun to set up a home server and backup the data first.

So using whatever logic you see fit, assume I’ve justified playing with the new Microsoft Windows Home Server product.

My home network set up is:

• DI-604 hub, DHCP, and router to my cable connection.
• DWL-7100AP wireless access point.
• Two desktops running Vista Ultimate.
• One laptop.
• One Xbox 360.

I’ll also be adding a media center to the mix as soon as I can decide what it should actually do, but that’s another story entirely. Suffice to say the server gives me a chance to try out some quiet equipment without it being a disaster if it still sounds like the shuttle taking off.

Build

I went for:
(hardware from Scan, software from eBuyer, prices from January 9th 2008, excluding VAT).

• 2 x 750 GB Western Digital Caviar GP (WD7500AACS) = £207.38 (£103.69 each) (review)
• AMD AM2 Athlon 64 BE-2400 (45W, Brisbane Core) = £54.28
• Asus M2A-VM HDMI (mATX) = £36.15 (review)
• 300W Silverstone Fanless PSU = £64.99
• 2GB Corsair TwinX XMS2 DDR2 DHX = £46.79
• CoolerMaster Centurion 5 Silver Case = £29.79
• ASUS Silent Square EVO Quiet CPU Cooler = £27.69
• Microsoft Windows Home Server OEM, 10 CALs = £83.20
• Total: £550.27

I’ll probably add another 2GB of memory to that depending how VM’ing goes.
For the most part I picked quiet, low power components and I think this compares well to the HP Media Smart Home Server on Amazon at £449.99 inc. VAT. which didn’t have the room for toying with that I’d like.

The build was fairly painless even though the Centurion case isn’t the best. The ASUS CPU cooler very quiet but huge. It wouldn’t fit in anything less that a full width ATX chassis and I had to remove the heat funnel from the Centurion case. It only just fit over the heat exchangers on the Corair memory. I fit the memory after the cooler so there was a bit of bending and scraping, but in the end they both fit touching snuggly.

The loudest components in the system are the two Centurion chassis fans, even then it’s quieter than both my Sky+ box and Xbox 360. The Asus FanQ technology never seems to turn the fans off, so I got some temperature readings of with them manually unplugged.

Idle: (With / Without Fans)

• CPU : 30 °C / 39 °C
• MB : 35 °C / 43 °C
• PSU : 25 °C / 25 °C
• HD0 : 28 °C / 36 °C
• HD1 : 29 °C / 35 °C

Burn-In Max Temps. with SiSoftware Sandra: (With / Without Fans)

• CPU : 33 °C / 53°C
• MB : 30 °C / 45°C
• PSU : 25 °C / 25°C
• HD0 : 23 °C / 41°C
• HD1 : 24 °C / 39°C

To properly vent the heat without fans you’d need to look at a better passive cooling system for the MB and CPU like heat pipes. That would would give you a very quiet fanless system (the ASUS CPU cooler has a low RPM fan inside the vents). If you could live with reduced lifespan and performance you could probably get away without any fans as the operating temperatures for the CPU (ADH2400DOBOX) is 55 °C to 78 °C and for HD’s (WD7500AACS) is -40 °C to 55 °C.

Install

The WHS install is very straight forward. You don’t get any choice over partition or drive configuration, WHS automatically wipes and configures all connected drives in the system after warning you. Other than that, you get to name the server and set the password then it installs Windows Server and the WHS components unattended.
I’d read some discouraging drivers issues regarding AHCI so I left the SATA controller in IDE mode during install, opting to let WHS manage the physical drives and planning to try out AHCI or RAID later to take advantage of hot swap and NCQ.

Before installing WHS I gave XP a whirl to check out the graphics performance.
The integrated ATI X1250 (built into the M690G northbridge) performs well enough for desktops and accelerated video decoding, but I wouldn’t recommend playing any games on it. The World of Warcraft login screen ran very slowly. It’s Vista Aero certified so for a media center application it would be more than capable, with dual head on VGA and HDMI or DVI. The integrated audio outputs through the HDMI lead as well, making it very neat for connecting to a HDTV.
The only odd thing I encountered was that after installing the ATI integrated graphics driver installation the BIOS and POST screens didn’t output on DVI/HDMI, just VGA. I’m guessing this is because the drivers enabled dual head, treating DVI/HDMI and VGA as separate ports.

The only stability issue I have is that on first boot the system hangs on the WHS login screen. Hit reset and all it well. As I’ve only had to reboot a couple of time I’ve not checked the event log or tried to troubleshoot this yet so it could be a driver or WHS issue. I had no problems with XP.

WHS

Installing the client connector software, creating user accounts and syncing passwords is a doddle. In a few hours the client machines were happily backed up on the WHS machine. For dynamic DNS I stuck with the DI-604’s built in support for dyndns.com and my existing account, so I don’t know how smooth the Microsoft provided domain is to set up.

WHS comes with Windows Firewall installed so if you change the default IIS http and https ports, or set up any additional services (apache, svn etc.) you need to remember to open up the ports up.

The KB946676 issue is minor, but I’ve held off using Sync Toy or storing any One Note files on the system until it is resolved.

Password syncing between client machines and the server is basically manual, the connector software just informs you when they’re out of sync and allows you to update the server password. It does enforce a minimum password length and complexity for any account with remote access.

What’s really interesting is that you can promote your WHS to a Primary Domain Controller by running DCPROMO. WHS is based on Small Business Server so the same EULA and built-in PDC restrictions as that flavour of Windows Server 2003 apply (basically the server can only ever be a PDC, can’t be joined as a BDC but other non-SBS servers can be BDC’s). Doing this is likely unsupported, and requires your clients are running Vista Business/Ultimate or XP professional, but it does get you a home Windows Server based domain which has a few advantages:

• True single sign on for your clients, no password syncing.
• An LDAP server to authenticate against for other services (Apache mod_ldap etc.).
• Transparent Explorer authentication in IIS or Apache.
• Global security policies for password complexity and life span.
• Group based security and central managment.

And of course, the headache (or fun) of managing a Windows Server 2003 domain installation.
I’ve not done this yet, but plan to give it a whirl in the next few weeks. I assume there are a few things specific to the WHS software that you need to make sure you don’t screw up, but that’s just like administering any Windows server.

If it also installs a DNS server as part of the dcpromo, that would be ideal, as then you can then assign multiple IP’s to your server and have them resolve correctly to different services, such as IIS or Apache instances rather than splitting your services into more and more obscure port numbers.