The document provides high level advice to developers on maintaining Windows Home Server’s strong user experience, through careful consideration of the following design recommendations:

1. Software solutions should work without additional configuration.
2. Issues should resolve automatically.
3. The console is not a general-purpose desktop.
4. Software must be installed through the Add-In page in Windows Home Server Settings
5. Console tabs should be used only when appropriate.
6. Console tabs should be limited.
7. Application configuration must be conducted through a Windows Home Server Settings page.
8. Notifications should be used sparingly.
9. The colour blue must be used *lots* (OK, I made that one up)

There’s lots more detail on these topics in the document, which is essential reading for all community and other developers out there thinking of writing add-ins for Windows Home Server.

Download: microsoft.com

• Windows Home Server Documentation Updated
• Add-In Review: TiVo Publisher for Windows Home Server
• HP MediaSmart Server Update - PVConnect Doesn’t Play Nicely With SlimServer
• Download the Windows Home Server Toolkit and Manual
• How To… Install Add-Ins

Jim Clark recently put together an excellent series of articles describing some of the steps that Microsoft could take to educate the Average Joe about Windows Media Center and expand the market for WMC. Obviously, those of us spending our days perusing sites like We Got Served would not be the target of such an effort, but our lives are full of these Average Joes. Over the next several weeks I am going to be sharing my experiences as I essentially build a network from the ground up, tailored to implementing Windows Home Server and Windows Media Center together.

My ultimate goal in sharing my experiences with you is to provide insight into how you can maximize Windows Media Center and Windows Home Server in an environment of novice users. There should be points of interest along the way for users of all backgrounds though. Being a bit of nerd, I will be building or retrofitting all of the systems myself and sharing tips on what kind of hardware to select, but will also be providing tips on what to look for in retail systems for those WGS readers not interested in building their own systems. I will be detailing some of the specific software and hardware accessories that I recommend for maximizing ease-of-use and family life integration. I will also be extensively exploring how to use WMC in a home theater PC, or HTPC, and the pros and cons of dedicating a PC to the living room versus using Media Center Extenders throughout the house. Finally, I will be discussing some of the considerations that go into using Windows Media Center in a multi-PC environment and how to integrate multiple WMC machines, extenders, and WHS in a cohesive way that will remain transparent and user-friendly for even the least savvy of computer users.

The Ad-hoc Network

The issues involved in deploying Windows Media Center for novice users are nothing new for me, but I want to give some background into why I am going to explore this topic with you, the reader, through the lens of an entire network deployment. After all, I do not expect that most readers will be interested in undertaking quite such an extensive action simply to roll out WMC or WHS. However, if the following situation sounds familiar, you might just change your mind.

My family’s first Media Center PC was an HTPC that I put together shortly after MCE 2005 became available. It was such a success that it quickly supplanted our cable company’s DVR. This HTPC remained the centerpiece of our entertainment center for more than a year. It wasn’t always an easy arrangement. Being the only Media Center system in the house, it was also my experimental testing grounds for new plug-ins, registry hacks, and all around tech tinkering. While I learned a lot from this experimentation, the resulting instabilities, incompatibilities, and the occasional borked system tried my wife’s patience.

After more than a year of this arrangement, our home network went through an unparalleled round of expansion. We went from having two PCs, the family PC and the HTPC, to having four PCs, an Xbox 360, a laptop, and a NAS over the course of a year. PCs got shuffled from room to room as I attempted to give each family member their own PC, began migrating to Windows Vista, and switched to using the Media Center Extender in the Xbox 360 instead of dedicating a PC for use as an HTPC. The result of all this movement has been a situation that I am sure many WGS readers have encountered at one point or another: a disorganized mess of a network with inconsistent network setups, out of synch OS installations, and no coherent backup and monitoring strategy.

The plan is to reboot the network. I will start with the networking equipment. My router is failing and I want to make the jump to gigabit to take advantage of the Cat 6 cable I ran through the house a couple of years ago. It is overkill, but that never stopped me before. Next up comes the WHS machine to replace the NAS. I have been meaning to build a WHS since it came out, but have found one reason or another to put it off. Joining the team here at WGS and the recent release of Power Pack 1 means I have no excuses left. Tune in next time to learn more about how I went about building this server, prepped the new network, and prepared the existing machines for the new network.

• Salutations!
• Integrating Windows Home Server with Windows Media Center
• Wanted: Windows Media Center & Digital Media News Writers
• Media Center Integration With Windows Home Server - Your Ideas?
• Hello from Across The Pond

Head over to the Microsoft Connect website to download and read the Beta release documentation for yourself. All of the following information is in that document, plus a bit more.

Server Storage and Shared Folder Enhancements

• The data corruption bug has been “addressed.”  At this point we aren’t going to say fixed.  That is one of the main focuses of this beta, as the only way to really verify this is to test it on a wide variation of systems.
• Long file paths are now supported on the Windows Home Server shared folders
• The Drive Extender functionality has been tweaked.  It will no longer constantly report that the system is balancing, and has been optimized for performance and runs when the following conditions occur:
  1. Every hour.
  2. When the Drive Extender Migrator service starts up - namely when you computer is first turned on.
  3. When a shared folder is added or removed using the Windows Home Server Console’s Shared Folders tab.
  4. When duplication on a shared folder is turned on or off.
  5. When a hard drive is added to Server Storage using the Windows Home Server Console.

  Furthermore, the console will only report the last time the serer was balanced, rather than when it is balancing.

• Overall performance improvements:
  1. The Drive Extender Migrator will use non-cached memory when moving files across secondary drives. This should improve the performance of migration passes, and speed up hard drive removal.
  2. File copy performance to and from the Windows Home Server shared folders has been improved.
• Home Server proactively checks the health of all files stored in the shared folders during a migration pass.  If any issues are discovered, a yellow health notification will be sent containing a detailed conflict reason for each file. Files that remain open for more than 24 hours are reported with a conflict of “File is open” as the Migrator needs the files to be closed to allow duplication to occur.  Any other file conflicts other than “File is open” should be reported as a bug on Connect.
• Hard drive removal has been enhanced to list the files which Home Server was not able to move off the hard drive being removed.  The reason for the failure is also noted in a details page which appears ath the end of the hard drive removal wizard.
• With Power Pack 1, Windows Home Server proactively searches for orphan shadows on the Home Server hard drive and places them in “D:\folders\{1618D36B-F4E7-4360-B070-A32070519DC9}\”
• A new and improved storage size algorithm has been implemented for listing Server Storage.

There is a known issue of Home Server blue screening with a specific “THIRD_PARTY_FILE_SYSTEM_FAILURE (108)” error code.  This is a known issue and is encouraged to be reported.  Check out the documentation for more details about this, and what to do if it does crash.

Windows Home Server Connector Enhancements

• The Windows Home Server Connector can now e installed on home computers using Windows Vista x64 operating systems.
• Better guidance is provided when the home computer clock and the Home Server clock differ significantly during Connector installation.
• Functionality is added to detect that the version of the Windows Home Server software.  If there is a mismatch, users will be prompted to manually update the Windows Home Server Connector software on their home computers.  This release enables automatic updating of the Windows Home Server Connector software in the future.
• The Windows Home Server Connector tray icon should no longer cause a flickering issue when auto-hide task bar is enabled.
• If the Windows Home Server Connector software is installed using the new Power Pack 1 Connector CD, then the home computer will automatically have the latest version of the Windows Home Server Connector software.

Home Server Data Backup (New Feature)

• While adding a hard drive to the Windows Home Server, the user is now presented with an option to use the hard drive for backing up the server.  Once this option is selected, the Home Server will appear in the Computers & Backup - where a user can decide what information they want to store on this external hard drive.
• Functionality is provided to allow restoring shared folders from an external hard drive that was used for Windows Home Server Data Backup

Remote Access Enhancements

• When adding/editing a user in the Home Server Console, in addition to enabling remote access for that user, there is now a drop down list box that allows the Home Server administrator to specify whether the user will have ascces to the computers tab, the shared folders tab, or both in remote access.
• The Routers and Domain name configuration details dialogs in the Remote Access Settings Page have been reworked to include more descriptive status, and contextual help links for failed tests.
• A new “Views” drop-down list is added for the Shared Folders tab in remote access which allows the files in a shared folder to be displayed as either a list of files (”Details” view) or as thumbnails (”Icons” view). In “Icons” view, the majority of the picture files will be presented as thumbnails, and the rest of the non-picture files and folders will be displayed as large icons.
• File upload functionality has been improved for users of Internet Explorer 6 and 7:
  • Users can drag and drop multiple files directly into an upload area or select multiple files in the open file dialog for upload.
  • Upload progress reporting has been improved, with the addition of a progress bar and individual file upload status.
  • Ability to cancel the multiple upload has been added as well.
• Ability for large file uploads to complete before the remote session times out has been implemented.
• When you download multiple files, the users are now give the option to package the files in a self extracting executable (.exe) file in addition to being able to store them in a ZIP file.  Self extracting executable files should be used for downloading files with filenames that use non-ASCII characters (e.g. Japanese, Chinese, Korean, et cetera).

Home Computer Backup Enhancements

• If the backup database on the home server has an inconsistency error, the user can now use the backup database repair wizard to correct this error.  The repair wizard can be launched either through the Backup page in Settings, or by clicking on the backup database inconsistency error notification.
• A new option has been added to the Windows Home Server Connector tray icon that allows the user to enable or disable the home computer from waking up for backup if it is in sleep or hibernation mode.
• Users can now run Backup Cleanup while the single file restore dialog is open.
• Changed the name of the excluded folder from “Media Center temporary files” to “Recorded TV”.
• Windows Vista SP1 was incorrectly reported as “Windows Server Longhorn” in the Computers & Backup tab.
• Home computers running any versions of Windows XP Media Center Edition (2004, 2005), will be displayed as “Windows XP Media Center Edition” in the Computer & Backup tab.
• The Home Computer Restore CD automatically downloads and runs the latest version of the computer restore software from the Home Server when a user chooses to restore a home computer.
• The previous two versions of the Home Computer Restore CD have been replaced by a new version (Dual Boot) to support a wider range of home computers.  The Power Pack 1 Home Computer Restore CD (what a mouthful) gives the user two options - one is recommended for use on home computers with less than 512MB of memory and the other option is recommended for use on home computers with 512MB or more of memory.

Media Sharing Enhancements

• Windows Media Player Playlists pointing to media files stored on a home server should now play correctly via Windows Media Connect when these playlists are copied over to a home server and shared out via media sharing.

Miscellaneous Enhancements

• Processor power management is enabled by default in Windows Home Server using the “Server Balanced Process Power and Performance” power scheme as the default setting.
• The Windows Home Server setup process will no longer report an issue with Windows Desktop Search service during the initial installation of a Home Server from the Windows Home Server Installation DVD.
• The Windows Home Server logo should now be correctly displayed during the initial setup of a new home server.

Installation and Updates

Just as a warning, make sure you completely update everything before installing Power Pack 1.  Also, if you have a pre-release of PP1, you will need to uninstall that manually before installing the public beta.  You will likely have to uninstall this beta before upgrading to the official release when the beta is over.

Summary

Well, that was a lot of info.  Now to boil this down to the important parts.  The corruption bug is nearing a complete fix and due to some of the work, many aspects of the Drive Extender have been optimized.  Not to mention, all that complaining about certain features have been address.  Microsoft has been listening to us.  They have tweaked pretty much every part of Windows Home Server to work better, run faster and do more of what we want in a Home Server.  They haven’t been twiddling their thumbs.  If anything, I’m sure their hands are raw, bloody messes because of all the hours they’ve logged working on Power Pack 1, the corruption bug and making it more user friendly, and easier for average people to figure out.

Also, I have intentionally skipped over and didn’t included any of the testing scenarios or how to back up your system.  I’m not going to cover that at this time, due to the complexity and the length of information. Stay tuned for a number of ways to prepare for testing PP1 Beta and what you should do to test it out!

• Windows Home Server Power Pack 1 In Depth: External Backup
• A Guide to Windows Home Server Power Pack 1 Beta - Part 3
• Windows Home Server September Update - Yours Today
• Windows Home Server Power Pack 1 In Depth: WHS Connector Installation Walkthrough
• Windows Home Server Video Training from Scott Lowe and Train Signal

Want to know more?  Well, here it is:

If you want to create a Windows Home Server Flash Drive, you will need a 2GB stick because the DVD takes 1.2GB of space.  The Windows Home Server Restore Disk takes about 130MB so a 256MB stick or larger is preferred because of additional drivers and such.  Windows Vista takes about 2.4GB for the 32-bit version and about 3.2GB for the 64-bit verions, so you are going to want to use a 4GB stick.

As a word of warning, older USB flash drives may not be bootable, and some older systems will not boot off of USB drives.  Both of these can be check in either your motherboard’s documentation, or by checking BIOS.

Insert your USB Flash Drive into any computer with Windows Vista. Make sure that it installs it correctly and everything comes up fine. Now, make sure anything important is off of the drive because we are going to be formatting it in just a bit.

1. Load an elevated command prompt (Start menu-> all programs -> accessories -> right click on “Command Prompt” and click on “Run as Administrator”).
2. Type in “diskpart” and hit Enter.
3. Next type each the follow commands in respective order at the “DISKPART>” command prompts. Note - this assumes that disk 2 is the USB flash drive (as it was on my system). You will need to replace the “2” in “select disk 2” with the disk number of your USB flash drive.

list disk
select disk 2
clean
create partition primary
select partition 1
active
format fs=fat32
assign
exit

This should all come out looking like this:

After this is done, you can make the USB Flash Drive intaller for Windows Vista or Windows Home Server.

Windows Home Server

If you want to create an installer flash disk for Windows Home Server, find that Server Install Disk and copy its contents over to the USB Flash drive. This may take 20-30 minutes or longer. After this is done, you can also make the installer automated by creating a file called “qs.ini” on the flash drive. This has to be in the root directory else the installer will not find it. Create the file, and change the product key to yours and the server name to your desired name:

[Q Setup]
ProductKey=00000-00000-00000-00000-00000
ServerName=SERVER

This will now automatically install Windows Home Server on the computer when you boot off of it.

WHS Restore Disk

Easier thand WIndows Home Server, just copy the contents of the Windows Home Server Restore CD to the USB Flash Drive. Just boot from it, and you can restore any computer that can boot for USB drives. Great for that laptop with the burned out CD/DVD drive. Don’t forget to add drivers that you may need on this as the Restore console may need them.

Windows Vista

Not much different than Windows Home Server here. Just copy the contents of the DVD to the flash drive. After it is done copying, if you create a file called “PID.TXT” in “X:\sources\” where “X” is the flash drive, and change “value” to your product key, it won’t ask you for your key or which version of Vista you want to install:

[PID]
Value=00000-00000-00000-00000-00000

Done

You’re done, that is it. Just remove the Flash Drive, and boot from it. There are several ways to get your computer to boot from the USB Flash Drive now. My computer hitting F8 during the BIOS load screen allows me to choose what drive to boot from. I prefer this way because you should only ever need to boot from removable media once. The other way is to get into your bios and change the boot order so that the USB drive boots first. After it has reset once, you need to change it back unless you want it to install over and over again. I would go over how to do this but each bios is pretty much unique to the hardware.

Don’t forget to add SATA/RAID if you need them. Also, assuming you have the space, you can add any drivers or other programs that you may need to this flash drive because it is going to be there anyways.

Good luck, and have fun installing.

Credits

This page was original written by Donavon from HomeServerHacks, and modified to include how to install Windows Vista, and Windows Home Server Restore Disk.

• FAQ: How To… Upgrade From a Trial or Beta Version of Windows Home Server
• Windows Home Server Public Beta - Home Computer Restore CD (Dual Boot)
• How To: Create a Slipstreamed, Unattended Windows Home Server Installation DVD
• A Guide to Windows Home Server Power Pack 1 Beta - Part 3
• Installing Windows Home Server - Beta 2

They require a little digging outside the WHS Console, so do take care and follow the guides step by step.

More Info: myhomeserver.com

• How To… Add A USB Hard Drive to Windows Home Server
• Windows Home Server “How To” Tutorials Updated
• How To… Install Add-Ins
• Add-In Review: WHS Customizer
• How to… Configure Remote Access in Windows Home Server

Join the Microsoft Home Server Team as they present and demonstrate the new Windows Home Server Tool Kit. The Tool Kit is a collection of utilities that help users diagnose Windows Home Server product installation and operation related issues within their home networks. This webcast will give you a technical overview of Tool Kit functionality and usability and help you better support Windows Home Server.

Presenters:

Michael Elizarov
Gildo De Simone
Daryn Rank

More Info: Microsoft Parner Program (Registration Required)

• Windows Home Server Toolkit v1 Released
• Download Kevin Beares’ WHS Presentation From the Vancouver Technology User Group Meeting
• Microsoft KB 955690: Outlook Personal Folder Files & Database Files Unsupported via Network on Windows Home Server
• Windows Home Server User’s Guide - Available Next Week
• Add-in: LogPoint Performance Monitor

This week, Microsoft published a technical brief for Drive Extender that outlines the technology in detail, covering:

• Features and Functionality
• Benefits
• Comparison to RAID
• Drive Extender Filter and Migrator Service
• The Magic of Tombstones
• Balancing Storage
• NTFS and Drive Extender
• Unhealthy and Missing Hard Drives

It does a great job of explaining some of the dark art of Windows Home Server in a pretty clear way. If you’re interested in understanding how WHS works, it’s a great read.

Download: microsoft.com

• Charlie Kindel Interview Online at Hanselminutes.com
• How To… Add A USB Hard Drive to Windows Home Server
• Use Windows Home Server to Back Up NTFS Compressed Files?
• Windows Home Server Data Corruption Bug Fix Slated for June 2008
• Ars Technica Reviews Windows Home Server

The latter document gives an overview of setting up and testing remote access in Windows Home Server, along with some “under the hood” tips and tricks for improving your experience with WHS.

Tips include:

• Increasing the Remote Access time-out parameter
• Troubleshooting Remote Access to Windows Home Server
• Changing the image on the Remote Access home page
• Changing the image that appears after you log on via Remote Access
• Showing additional information about a web page error.

Troubleshooting Windows Home Server Connector Installation helps you identify and resolve issues that occur during or after installing the WHS Connector software on your home computers. Highlights include:

• Preliminary checks
• How to determine if you have a firewall problem
• Name resolution
• Firewall configuration
• Alternate Name Resolution

Download: Technical Brief for Windows Home Server Remote Access | Troubleshooting Windows Home Server Connector Installation 

• HP MediaSmart Server Update - PVConnect Doesn’t Play Nicely With SlimServer
• Download the Windows Home Server Toolkit and Manual
• Having Trouble With Windows Home Server RC1? Help is at Hand.
• Windows Home Server September Update - Yours Today
• Windows Home Server Toolkit v1 Released

That’s the point - it just works - WHS sucessfully hides a lot of pretty amazing technology from the user, to make using the home server as simple as possible. So, I thought it would be interesting to take a look at some of that technology and see if I can do any kind of decent job of explaining it to the everyday user. I’m calling these posts “Under the Hood“, and this may be the first and last if I can’t figure out the technology myself.

First up is Windows Home Server backup, or rather, one particular element of backup which provides a great benefit to the user.

Let’s say you have a two desktops and a laptop on your home network - the desktops each have a 250Gb drive, and the laptop and 80Gb drive. And let’s say they’re all half full. That’s 290Gb of storage to back up every night and hang on, I only have 750Gb of storage in my home server - it’s going to fill up in like three days!

How does WHS fit in so many daily backups of all my computers in a limited amount of space?

The answer’s actually pretty simple, thanks to a piece of smart thinking.

Each night, Windows Home Server checks the data on each of your machines and only backs up data that it hasn’t backed up before - i.e. if a file on your desktop hasn’t been changed since it was originally backed up, it doesn’t need to be backed up again, so that’s one way of saving space.

Better still, if you have the same data on multiple machines, WHS only stores one copy of that data, but registers that it belongs on each machine. So when it comes to restoring the files, WHS knows which machines to restore that data to.

Let me give you an example - Windows system files. The laptop I’m writing this post on is a Windows XP Pro machine. The Windows System folder (holding all of the operating system files) is 2.05 Gb. I definitely want this folder backed up in case something goes wrong with my laptop. But those same system files also exist on the XP Media Center machine I use upstairs in the den - they’re exactly the same operating system files. (XP Media Center is very much based on XP Pro. It just has a prettier dress and a few new dance moves). So WHS backs up the files once, but knows that they’re needed on both machines if I choose to restore either of them. Pretty smart, and saves storage space and backup time.

That’s why your first WHS backup often takes a while - the first backup of your first machine post-installation is literally backing up everything. Subsequently, data on your other machines is compared to the data backed up from the first machine, and if it’s the same, there’s no need to back it up - it’s already safely stored.

Hope you’re still with me - it’s time to get under the hood.

So, how does this all work? Windows Home Server uses a version of a technology known as Single Instance Storage. The general idea behind Single Instance Storage (or SIS as it’s known) is that which I’ve tried to bring to life above - keeping one copy of data that multiple computers share. SIS is used quite commonly in lots of backup solutions and other server products - email systems, file servers that sort of thing.

In the example above, I mentioned that WHS each night compares data it has already backed up (the Windows System files on my laptop) with data on other machines (the same files on my Media Center machine) and then takes a call on whether to back those files up too or not.

Windows Home Server doesn’t actually compare or even store the whole files themselves. It works with fragments of those files - called clusters. Your Windows Home Server comes with a built-in, custom-designed database which has two jobs:

1. Store fragments of your data (clusters)
2. Store metadata (data about data) that describes how to reassemble those fragments of data into an entire file system if required.

So for the first backup of the first machine, WHS examines every cluster on that machine, and generates a hash (a checksum generated from performing a calculation on the data itself) which is stored in the database. If another cluster is examined and is found to be the same (by comparing the hash values), then this is noted in the database, but the cluster is not stored again.

The following day, the same process occurs, but only new or changed clusters are copied to the database.

Working at this deeply granular level, using single instance storage means that Windows Home Server is massively efficient at only storing the data it really needs, whilst still guaranteeing that you can backup individual files, folders or indeed your entire computer should you wish.

Head hurting? Yep, mine too. Thanks to MVP Doug Knox and Charlie Kindel for providing a lot of the insight above. Their heads aren’t hurting as much as mine

• Windows Home Server Power Pack 1 In Depth: External Backup
• BitDefender Total Security 2009 Beta 2 Now Available
• Microsoft KB 955690: Outlook Personal Folder Files & Database Files Unsupported via Network on Windows Home Server
• WHS Data Corruption Issue: KB 946676 Updated
• Windows Home Server November Update Coming Tuesday November 27th