An appropriate tribute to the god of computing?

[Solignis]

I was treated to a wonderful surprise when I got home tonight.

Ah, the sound of plastic and metal grinding. The sound was coming from my computer!!.

After investigating I found the problem to be one of my fans. The motor bearing failed on it.

I then removed it and proceeded to restart my computer, only to realize the machine was hanging at the POST. I began to sweat. So I began unplug parts till I found out which one was malfunctioning. Luckily on my first guess I pulled one of my hard drives. I was correct, it was my windows xp disk. With that sigh of relief I am back online.

The computer gods have shown me what happens to those who do not pay tribute.

What would a fitting tribute be?

First born child (don't have one)

Sacrifice a laptop?

Maybe offer them the blood of Steve Jobs or Bill Gates?

All hail the omnipotent beings who watch over our computers!!

[lohearn]

This morning before going to work I head in to my home office to start my day. I go to get a few files off my windows home server and there doesn't seem to be anyone home at the server. I do a couple of small troubleshooting things to it, like restart it. Notice that there are no lights to the ethernet ports, the USB ports are unresponsive and there's no video. Rather than rip the machine apart at home I unplug it and struggle with it out to the car to bring it in to work.

Did I mention that this is an 8 year old Chieftec, full steel, full tower server case and I am an out of shape 46 year old woman who is taking this down a flight of six stairs in a snow storm??

The techs at work open her up and peek inside. What they find is one very toasted evga video card. All but three capacitors on it are blown. Stick in a new card, starts to come up and now we have video, but the message unable to boot from disk does not make me happy! Tech looks and notices that one of the hard drive power cables is loose, plugs it firmly into drive and restarts. Same message, now at this point I am truly not a happy camper. Then another tech says "check the boot order". Sure enough, move the drive from the 4th position to the 1st position in the boot order and I'm back in business.

Guess the PC gods were good to both of us!!!

[sky-knight]

The one reason why I don't sell Windows Home server....

The drives aren't using NTFS or anything standard for a file system. If the box fails to boot... you're just SOL.

[lohearn]

The one reason why I don't sell Windows Home server....

The drives aren't using NTFS or anything standard for a file system. If the box fails to boot... you're just SOL.

For all that whs server does for us at our house we love it. Pretty much it's a server for people who know nothing about servers or how to setup RAIDs, or which RAID to choose for their needs. It's not a standard set up but for us we love it.

It gives us a basic backup service, how many people actually back up their home PCs on a regular basis?

We have network storage accessible by all PCs in the house.

Networked media storage for movies, music and photos that all media devices on the network can connect to.

Easy remote access to the server's shared folders and desktop PCs from the web.

We've been using ours for 6 months and I really have nothing bad to say about it. For what it is it does a lot. It is far from a "real" server but we like it. I have 4 drives in my server with duplication running on most of the shares. I don't trust that one of those drives won't fail so the more the merrier. If one dies the server, and my files, will survive. And I've not had the problem but I know others who did have their servers crash for one hardware reason or another and the files they said were easily recovered from the hard drives?

[Solignis]

What does WHS for its file system?

Considering its microsoft i would think ntfs or fat32.

[lohearn]

Well, windows home server is based on windows server 2003 so if I had to guess I would say NTFS. I'm not sure, I just know it works and I like it.

The folder duplication/shares thing is really a software based RAID from what I've read.

[Zen One]

The one reason why I don't sell Windows Home server....

The drives aren't using NTFS or anything standard for a file system. If the box fails to boot... you're just SOL.

sky-knight, someone gave you just plain wrong info on Windows Home Server..... WHS is very much Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2 under the hood and the file system is indeed NTFS.

Great little boxes for home or a small business even!

ZenOne

[lordcom]

The file system is NTFS, they have just used a little magic and saved us the trouble of fiddling around with raid...
For all intents and purpose we can compare it to lvm in linux... It's just easier to unplug disks in WHS... Ive got 2 running in my house, I've gotten creative with synctoy and use one of the WHS's to copy the user files and backup my computers. But for all it's worth doing backups, x64 machines doesn't restore that easy from WHS... But at least my files are secured...

[sky-knight]

sky-knight, someone gave you just plain wrong info on Windows Home Server..... WHS is very much Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2 under the hood and the file system is indeed NTFS.

Great little boxes for home or a small business even!

ZenOne

That "info" you say "someone" gave me is info I got for myself installing that mess thanks to an Action Pack license.

It doesn't pass muster... sorry this thing is a larger mess than SMB server and will never be in my product line up. The "make it easy" approach for servers doesn't do anything but cause pain when things fail.

Then again... I have this large aversion to software RAID. I hadn't considered attempting to recover the drives with Windows Server... which if it's a RAID 5 via NTFS RAID support would be required.

But, regardless of my annoyance with yet another piece of trash from Microsoft I'm going to have to test this theory soon. It does seem to be gathering a bit of a following and I'd better get my tools to save it lined up before I have another newly wed couple crying their eyes out in my office because they lose their wedding/honeymoon photos...

[lohearn]

But, regardless of my annoyance with yet another piece of trash from Microsoft I'm going to have to test this theory soon. It does seem to be gathering a bit of a following and I'd better get my tools to save it lined up before I have another newly wed couple crying their eyes out in my office because they lose their wedding/honeymoon photos...

A smart kid I work with got me connected to WHS. I have to say it's been pretty terrific. It backs up all of our PCs at night, which is great since I run a small business along with working two other jobs. It's an easily expandable NAS, the easy remote/website feature to me is one of the best parts. I can copy files to my user folder on the server and get at them from anywhere with an internet connection. Plus, my user folder is not accessible to anyone else on my network, just to me.

The software itself is all of what, $90-$100 to purchase? What other MS product costs so little and does so much? I can't help it, I really like WHS and what it does for my family and I.