Home Server – Page 4

Seattle-bound for MVP Summit and Student Insider Meetup

I’ll be in Seattle February 23rd-March 3rd for Microsoft Student Insider stuff and the 2011 Microsoft MVP Summit. I’ll be taking my new SLR digital camera with me and taking lots of pictures, so look for those over the course of those eight days.

Please join me in welcoming the following to the Student Insider program for 2011:

Den Delimarsky –@denniscode – dennisdel.com – Den is what I consider a Windows Phone Ninja. He knows the platform inside and out and blogs about it extensively on his own website and on DreamInCode.
Drew Devault – @sircmpwn – sircmpwn.blogspot.com – Drew is an XNA and Silverlight wizard (and he’s still in high school!)
Billy O’Neal – @MalwareMiniGun – winwrench.com
Steven Nowak (Don’t have any blog or Twitter handle for Steven yet. When I do I’ll update this.)

MVP summit content is covered under the Non-Disclosure Agreement, so I’m not able to talk about what I’ll be doing there, other than to say that I’ll be meeting with the Home and Small Business Server team at various points through out the week. If you have any questions that you want me to try to answer, feel free to leave them in the comments.

Windows Home Server 2011 Walkthroughs

To coincide with the release of the Release Candidate build of Windows Home Server 2011, I will be posting walkthroughs of functionality in Windows Home Server 2011 periodically. These are very high-level walkthroughs (think 100-level) and are designed to provide a brief introduction into the Windows Home Server 2011 feature set.

(To view these walkthroughs you will need to have Adobe Flash Player installed.)

Walkthroughs:

Windows Home Server 2011 Dashboard

Windows Home Server 2011 Launchpad

Windows Home Server 2011 Remote Access

Windows Home Server 2011 Release Candidate Now Available

Today Microsoft has made available to the public, the Release Candidate build of Windows Home Server 2011.

This build is the first build made available without Drive Extender technology, and is the first build to officially reveal that “Vail” will indeed be called Windows Home Server 2011. (For those that remember, I blogged about this after some confusion during CES.)

Because there is no Drive Extender anymore, you will need to rely either on some form of RAID to increase your amount of available storage, or rely on a large single drive if you want lots of storage from the get go. Microsoft is not saying too much yet about what they and their OEMs strategy is around storage. Hopefully in the coming days and weeks we will know more.

As always, feedback is welcome and appreciated. Since this is a release candidate, not everything can or will be acted upon, but every bug report will be looked at. You can file bugs online through the Microsoft Connect website.

For the build number curious amongst us, this is build 8400.16385 and is available from Microsoft Connect today. The CRC and SHA1 hashes for the ISO have been posted below along with steps to check the integrity of the downloaded ISO.

Hashes for today’s release:

Volume label: GRMSHSxFRE_EN_DVD

CRC: 0xC191510A

SHA1: 0x65AB44627F12E6FC5268BE2ED9F5489CB98021DF

To run MSCDCRC against an ISO file that you have downloaded follow these steps.

Download MSCDCRC to the same folder that you downloaded the Vail ISO to. (Click here to download MSCDCRC)
Open a Command Prompt window and navigate to the folder from Step 1
Type “MSCDCRC EN-US_WHS_PREM_InstallDVD.iso” (without quotes)
The integrity check will take a few moments to complete. After the check is complete compare the CRC and SHA hashes to the hashes posted below
If the hashes match then you have successfully downloaded the ISO

WHS Vail Expiry Workaround

Yes, I realize that this is a little bit late as the August Preview build expires today, and may have already expired for some of you, but hopefully you can gain access to your server long enough to perform the following steps to extend the timebomb to mid-March.

1.    Install WS08 R2 SP1 RC on the server by clicking here
2.    Logon on https://connect.microsoft.com/WindowsHomeServer with your connect credentials
3.    Click on Product keys (in the left hand side column)
4.    Click on Request a new product key
5.    Click on Get Key
6.    In Windows Home Server, open a command prompt
7.    Type “slmgr.vbs -ipk ABCDE-FGHIJ-KLMNO-PQRST-UVWXY” (where ABCDE.. is your new key as requested above)
8.    Type “slmgr.vbs –ato”
9.   Reboot the server, and your beta timeframe has been extended. You can check this by opening up a command prompt and typing winver.

Proof that Windows Home Server “Vail” is Windows Home Server 2011

Over the last few days there has been speculation, possible confirmation, possible denial, and even silence on the matter of what the official name of Windows Home Server Code Name “Vail” will be when it is released later this year.

There was some speculation this past week that it would be called Windows 7 Home Server. That’s not correct. Here’s what I’m offering as proof that Vail will indeed be marketed as Windows Home Server 2011.

This past week at the Consumer Electronics Show, the Windows Home Server team showed off integration between Vail and Windows Phone 7, and then took to their blog to tell us all about it. In that blog post, there is a screenshot showing a remote access domain name (win7phone.homeserver.com). I decided to see if after the show that server was still up and publicly accessible. At the time these screenshots were taken, Microsoft’s demo server was still available. Upon arriving at the login screen, I was presented with Exhibit A.

If you look at the logo as well as the title bar it says Windows Home Server 2011.

To be completely clear, this is not a screenshot taken from a server of mine, it is not taken running a build of Vail that I have access to, nor is the image photoshopped in any way. This comes directly from a server hosted by Microsoft, using a build of their choosing, and it appears conclusive that Vail is in fact Windows Home Server 2011.

Windows Home Server Dynamic DNS Update

Microsoft just passed along some information that next week on January 11th, there will be an outage of the service that powers *.homeserver.com and *.remotewebaccess.com domain names. If you are a Windows Home Server or Windows Small Business Server user and are using a remote access domain name in one of those two categories, there is a chance that you will be affected.

This outage is taking place to migrate the service from the Windows Live Custom Domains platform to the Azure platform. By moving to Azure, stability and performance will be improved, and will lay the groundwork to support the new Windows Server Solutions products (Vail, Aurora, and SBS2011) being released later this year.

The outage will last approximately 24 hours and during this outage no updates will be able to be performed. What this means is that if your IP address changes during the downtime, your server will be unavailable until the outage is cleared. What this also means is that if you want to change your domain name or release your domain name, you will be unable to do so.

Also, you may see alerts stating that your server was unable to update your domain name, and any 3rd-party add-ins that rely on the remote access services may fail.

Not to worry however, when service is restored your server will automatically update the remote access configuration, alerts will disappear, and remote clients will be able to connect once more.

If after the update, in the rare case that your domain name is not working, follow these steps to correct your configuration.

1. Open the Windows Home Server Console

2. Click on Settings

3. Select the Remote Access item in the Settings page

4. Click Repair and follow the instructions on the screen

Windows Home Server Vail Public Preview Update

If you are using the Vail Public Preview that was released in August of 2010, please be aware that this build will be expiring on January 10th, 2011.

There is no workaround to prevent the build from expiring. If you have any data that you don’t wish to lose (which you shouldn’t as this is pre-production code), please back that data up before the 10th.

Microsoft announced in a forums post today that they are committed to providing an updated public preview build within the next 4-6 weeks.

Once a new build is released, you’ll find out about it here, the Microsoft forums, and the Windows Home Server team blog.

2011 Microsoft MVP for Windows Home Server

2011 sure has gotten off to a great start! I woke up yesterday to an e-mail in my inbox congratulating me on becoming an MVP for Windows Home Server.

Congratulations! We are pleased to present you with the 2011 Microsoft® MVP Award! This award is given to exceptional technical community leaders who actively share their high quality, real world expertise with others. We appreciate your outstanding contributions in Windows Home Server technical communities during the past year.

It is an incredible honor to join the ranks alongside the other Windows Home Server MVPs, and I look forward to helping the community in the year ahead.

Windows Server Code Name “Aurora” Public Preview now available

Today along with the release of the August Preview build of Windows Home Server “Vail”, Microsoft has released the first public preview of Windows Small Business Server “Aurora.”

Windows Small Business Server “Aurora” is what I’m going to call the younger brother of Small Business Server. Aurora is designed to be the “bridge to the cloud,” with on-premise features such as network monitoring, remote access, PC backup, and cloud features, such as e-mail and collaboration through services such as Microsoft’s Business Productivity Online Services Standard Suite (BPOS).

Aurora is designed for small businesses with less than 25 users and do not have the resources or budget for an SBS or even higher setup.

Aurora and Vail share the same code base so there is some feature overlap, and in the case of Aurora, the “home” features such as media sharing have been removed. Some of the features of Windows Small Business Server “Aurora” are listed below.

Active Directory integration for enterprise grade user and resource management.
Remote Web Access to files, computers, and applications created by third parties
Integration with Microsoft’s online service offering, BPOS
Client Connector and PC Backup of Mac OS X clients (must be using 10.5 or above)
Launchpad for quick access to common tasks
Drive Extender storage technology, first introduced with Windows Home Server v1, for easy upgrades and management of server storage

While this release is a public preview, it is not recommended that you use Aurora for production use as there is no support and there are some issues around server storage. I’ve listed those issues below.

There is a QFE available along with this build that addresses an issue where saving files to an Aurora server may fail when a large amount of data is present on the server. It is advised that this QFE be installed immediately after installing Aurora.
Storage Check and Repair is broken in this release, as under certain conditions, there may be data loss.
If a hard drive goes missing from the storage pool and you attempt to remove that missing hard drive from the storage pool, the removal wizard may inadvertently remove the wrong files from your server.

For the build number curious amongst us, this is Build 7657 and is available from Microsoft Connect today. The CRC and SHA1 hashes for the ISO have been posted below along with steps to check the integrity of the downloaded ISO.

Hashes for today’s release:

Volume label: GR0SAAxFRE_EN_DVD
CRC: 0x15C92BAA
SHA1: 0x83D7341DB9916145749A02B010981494227F1166

To run MSCDCRC against an ISO file that you have downloaded follow these steps.

Download MSCDCRC to the same folder that you downloaded the Vail ISO to. (Click here to download MSCDCRC)
Open a Command Prompt window and navigate to the folder from Step 1
Type "MSCDCRC InstallDVD.iso" (without quotes)
The integrity check will take a few moments to complete. After the check is complete compare the CRC and SHA hashes to the hashes posted below
If the hashes match then you have successfully downloaded the ISO

Full PC Restore from Windows Home Server Vail with a USB Flash Drive

The August Preview of Windows Home Server Vail is the gift that keeps on giving.

In this release, there is now a feature that enables you to plug a USB thumb drive into your server and create a bootable drive that contains the necessary software to perform a full system restore of a client PC.

The nice thing about the process is that the thumb drive is created for both 32 and 64 bit PCs meaning that you only need one thumb drive to restore any PCs in your house. Steps to perform a restore after the creation of the flash drive are largely unchanged from past releases or even WHS v1.

I performed a test restore of my netbook and I’ve included screenshots below of the restore process and the creation of the restore thumb drive.