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Microsoft Windows Home Server Beta 2
Testing - File Sharing and Backup
The first part of file sharing is copying the data from your local PCs to the network server. Since the WHS install is destructive, you can't put data on the HDs and then install the OS. So first I had to copy over 20GB of music from my computer down to the server. This took about an hour. Windows Home Server comes with five preset shared folders: Music, Photos, Public, Software, Users and Videos. In the Users folder is a private folder for each user created on the server.  There was one small problem with copying my music over initially. This was due to a duplication problem on the server. It seemed to have a hard time replicating some of my MP3s from one hard drive to the other. One thing I didn't like was having to spend an hour trying to find and then dig through log files to find out what the offending files were. Once I did find them out though I deleted them and the error went away. I copied the files back again and the error did not occur. Once the data was pushed over to the server however, the server worked flawlessly in sharing the files. I was able to use Winamp and tell it to use that as my library to pull from and it played music files without issue. Likewise, just about any application can read from the file share just like it was reading it from the hard drive, so there should be no compatibility problems. Backup was not as friendly as I had hoped though. The first major gripe I have with the backup system is that it is a resource hog. Another nagging point is that if I tell my computer to "Backup Now" it will ask me for a name that defaults to "Default Backup". It would be more useful to default the name to the current date and time.  Several times that I executed the manual backup, it hogged my computer's resources and the response of all applications and the operating system was very sluggish. Every time it slowed the response time of my applications, and a few times I had to wait until the backup was complete before I wanted to use my system again because it was lagging so badly. Even if it was only 10-15% of CPU utilization, it would bog down the system. One last caveat to the backup system is that the scheduled backup won't occur when your computer is turned off. Also, it won't try to automatically start when you turned your PC back on after a missed backup. One thing I suggested as a beta tester is a feature allowing you to set your PC to backup and then shut off when it is complete, so we'll see if that's in the final version I guess. Testing - Windows Media Connect I tested the Windows Media Connect feature of the Windows Home Server by trying to connect my Xbox 360 to the server using WMC. You can set this option in the Settings control panel in the Windows Home Server Console.  Once I got my Xbox 360 to see the server (I had to reboot the server to get the 360 to see it), I was able to view pictures, play MP3s and view WMV video files. I did download some WMV HD clips and test those as well, and the server had no problem serving up those higher bit-rate files. I should mention, the fact that you have to transcode your videos to WMV isn't really the fault of Windows Home Server - it's a limitation of the Xbox 360 and what video codecs it can play. There are plenty of programs and tutorials out there showing how to transcode your videos into WMV so it's not too terribly difficult.
Page 1: Introduction & Hardware Configuration
Page 2: Setup - Installing Server and Client Software Page 3: Testing - Client Console & Restore CD Page 4: Testing - File Sharing and Backup & Windows Media Connect Page 5: Testing - Remote Access & Running Other Applications Page 6: Upgrading to CTP & Upgraded Remote Access Page 7: Conclusion 
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