{"id":149,"date":"2009-09-11T10:48:22","date_gmt":"2009-09-11T10:48:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tuazon.co.uk\/blog\/?p=149"},"modified":"2009-09-11T10:48:22","modified_gmt":"2009-09-11T10:48:22","slug":"new-windows-home-server","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.tuazon.co.uk\/blog\/2009\/09\/11\/new-windows-home-server\/","title":{"rendered":"New Windows Home Server!"},"content":{"rendered":"

Following another<\/em> failure of our home PC about 2 months ago, I got approval from the “the powers that be” (aka my lovely wife)\u00c2\u00a0 to buy a new PC….\u00c2\u00a0 So I duly went off to the Dell website, and spec-ed up something suitable (and not too pricey).<\/p>\n

Dual Core 2.8Ghz, 4 Gb RAM, Vista 64 Bit (soon to be Win 7 – but that’s another post) and a 22″ full HD screen to cap it off.\u00c2\u00a0 Suffice to say, performance is superb – and knocks the old box into a cocked hat – not that it was shabby, just a bit old… 3Ghz P4, 2 Gb RAM, Shuttle RefleXion<\/a> Chassis….<\/p>\n

I was running an old HP SFF desktop with an assortment of external drives as my Home Server – and it was doing a wonderful job – it got all the data back following the PC failure, and it just sat in the corner of the Study humming away gently (if a little loudly). This week I took it upon my self to repurpose the old PC chassis as a replacement WHS box and to rearrange the layout of my LAN a bit \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n

So, I started off by testing out a load of hard drives I had lying around – mostly in external USB enclosures, they had all “failed” in some way shape or form – I suspect thay had got too warm in the cases and “freaked out” a bit – so stopped being visible to WHS. They all worked quite happily whaen removed from their enclosures, so I set about working out the best arrangement for them in the Shuttle case…. there’s room for 3 disks (once I’d removed the card reader and DVD and grabbed a set of brackets from E-Bay to fit one in the 5.25″ bay) so I started with just one, SATA disk and loaded WHS…..<\/p>\n

Everything went exactly as expected – as it should, and all the patches installed (eventually). I added the second disk, and dropped it into the storage pool – 1Tb… lovely….<\/p>\n

Next up was the plan to move the server to the Garage – but there’s no structured wiring to there….. bring on the Devolo<\/a> ethernet over power adaptors I bought AGES ago and never really got to work as expected (I put the original server in the garage when we first moved in – but it kept dropping it’s LAN connection – so I gave up and moved it next to the router)<\/p>\n

The trick with these little devices is to not plug them into “Surge Protection” power strips – I discovered this after lots of searching…. and I now get 50 – 70Mb connections showing for all of them – which seems to be good enough for WHS \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n

One weird thing I found was that I could only get an IP address on the server if I had one of the Devolo devices cabled direct to the router – rather than a switch away:<\/p>\n

Router -> Switch -> Structured Cable Drop to Lounge -> Devolo Device -> Power Circiut -> Devolo Device -> Server\u00c2\u00a0 gives NO IP<\/p>\n

but…<\/p>\n

Router -> Devolo Device -> Power Circuit -> Devolo Device -> Server\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 works a treat….. bizzarre!!<\/p>\n

It tool a fair bit of trial and error and a lot of walking up and down stairs to iron out this particular little glitch – but now that I’ve got it sussed, the new server is running very happily (and much cooler) in the garage.<\/p>\n

I’ll be decomissioning the old server over the weekend – once I’ve copied all my data off it to the new one. Once it’s decomissioned, I’ll pull the remaining disks and add them to the new server – so I should end up with 1.75Tb connected to it initially, and I’ll look at adding more in the future \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Following another failure of our home PC about 2 months ago, I got approval from the “the powers that be” (aka my lovely wife)\u00c2\u00a0 to buy a new PC….\u00c2\u00a0 So I duly went off to the Dell website, and spec-ed … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[8,10,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-149","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-personal","category-tech","category-whs"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6ZBD-2p","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tuazon.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/149","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tuazon.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tuazon.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tuazon.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tuazon.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=149"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.tuazon.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/149\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tuazon.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=149"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tuazon.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=149"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tuazon.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=149"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}