PC Magazine feeds back on Charlie K’s Chalk Talk session yesterday at WinHEC. Amongst other things, Charlie revealed:
1. WHS will not support WiFi connections to home routers - ethernet only (a pretty sensible decision, if you ask me, with the amount of backup activity required each night).
“We looked at the mountains we wanted to climb and we simply made the decision not to address this,” Kindel said. “Setting up and configuring wireless without a keyboard or a display, even with technologies like Windows Rally, is a challenging thing.”
“We wanted to make it simple,” Kindel added. “We assumed our customers would have an empty RJ45 port on the back…Will it change over time? Yeah, but in V1 it isn’t [there].”
2. WHS cannot be used as a home gateway, or router - just as a home server. (Sometimes, Microsoft Product Naming can be pretty accurate :-))
3. In the future, some home servers may come with a reset button, similar to a home router if they become corrupt. With WHS being predominately headless (ie. no keyboard, monitor or mouse) reinstallation of WHS on some machines may be difficult, so a reset button could be implemented to reformat and reinstall the system from a 512Mb flash drive that system builders are being asked to build in to their systems. The reset button is a really interesting approach to an age old problem, and may extend to standard PCs in the future.
4. There’s a small concern that OEMs may bundle a huge amount of bloatware into their WHS systems to try to differentiate their offering vs competitors - I can totally see this happening. The MS view, “our position is that it would be detrimental to the category.” (i.e. We can see it happening too, and it sucks).
The “consumer electronics” approach to WHS is fascinating - here’s a platform that’s probably best off hidden away in a cupboard, and yet the scale of hardware innovation already discussed and shown is immense - small form factors, elegant casings, envelope pushing hardware prototypes and now talk of a reset button to reinstall the system from scratch means that there a whole lot more to WHS than first meets the eye.
February 10th, 2008 at 10:39 pm
Windows Home Server still has an unresolved fatal flaw as acknowledge by Microsoft since April 3, 2007. It’s now Feb 10, 2008 and no resolution has been offered. Anyone thinking about using or buying WHS, should be made aware that all your data, at anytime, without warning may lead and cause your data to be corrupted.
See: http://www.support.microsoft.com/kb/946676
Data corruption isn’t want anyone should accept, pay for and experience. Fix it Microsoft!