Hi everyone,
I stumbled across this website a few days ago, as I was Googling instructions for setting up a home server. The short story is that, with my kids getting older and more able to use computers/tablets, and with me wanting to minimize the amount of home IT work I have to do, I decided to convert a computer I had sitting around the lab to a home server. I wanted to install an OS that was relatively easy/straight-forward to set up, didn't have tons of issues/bugs, and didn't require tons of technical skill to configure. I wanted 1) a no-hassle, set-once and forget backup solution that works for all of my home computers (1 Win 7 Pro desktop, 1 win 7 Pro laptop, 1 MBP running Mountain Lion), 2) a Dropbox-like solution that keeps certain directories on client machines synchronized with web-accessible directories on the server, 3) a central location from which to stream media (music, movies, and photos) to both machines and tablets on the local network and to remote computers, and 4) the possibility of setting up an email server at some point in the future.
Having read of the huge file system bugs in WHS and WHS 2011, I decided to stay away from them. Likewise, knowing that Linux/Unix-based operating systems work well, once the administrator learns a lot of the technicalities of Linux, and assuming he/she has hardware that drivers are available for, I decided to stay away those options. Since I don't leave my Mac laptop at home all of the time, that ruled out OS X server, which left me with WSE 2012.
I spent a few hours, spread over a few days last week, getting the server set up, and I'm generally happy with how the set up has gone. The machine is based on an i7-920 CPU (it's what I had, and MS seemed to say that getting good real-time transcoding performance requires a powerful CPU, though details were pretty light) with 9 GB DDR3 RAM. I have 5 HDs connected - a 500GB HD for the OS, 2x 2TB HDs in a 2-way mirrored pool for client machine backups, users, and non-media shared folders, a 2TB external HD for server backups, and a 500GB external drive for all of my media.
In terms of the functionality I want, most of the important stuff is there -
1) I have auto-backups configured for the server, and for all of the Windows machines. It looks like MBP time-machine backups are a no-go because some file system protocol isn't compatible between the two OSs. I've not yet tested those backups - I want to, to make sure that I can actually restore a computer who's HD dies, or which I decide to upgrade, with minimal hassle. Can anyone share experience on how well this works?
2) I at least have shared folders set up that can be accessed via the web interface, though I have no idea how to keep client directories synced to the server. Help here?
3) I have media sharing/streaming enabled via the built-in media server. Note that I wasn't able to put the media files on the pooled drives, as they didn't show up in the web interface. They show up just fine when accessed from the external USB HD. Streaming quality, at least for music, is great on local machines (using Windows Media Center on the Win7 machines and 8Player on the iPads), but not completely stellar when streaming to a remote computer via the web interface - once a song starts, it plays just fine, but there are frequently long pauses between songs, especially if I decide to skip a song that I don't want to listen to. What are the hardware/internet connection requirements for a good remote media streaming experience?
4) Don't know whether I'll be able to put an email server on WSE 2012. Didn't check before I took the leap. It'd be nice not to be storing all my email on other companies' servers, but it's not a problem that I'm ready to tackle yet.
As I've been browsing the forums here, I've seen that people in this WHS community are generally unhappy with the built-in media server, and that some of you still don't trust the storage pools technology (link) built into the new server OS. Could you link me to good references explaining the reasoning for your opinions about these two things? What do you recommend using in their place? Just for reference, almost all of my music is in iTunes (m4a) format, and almost all of my movies have been ripped from DVDs/Blu-Rays, using Handbrake, to m4v format.
Thanks. Glad there's a community for home server geeks.
Phillip