Be Excellent To Each Other

Dammit. Stop making me spend money.

By HP keep Myp and I in jobs

I have one in my ebuyer checkout, and have done for a while.
I want one, it seems incredibly useful, it means I could sleep my imac rather than just turn off the screen overnight.

However.

I would want Sickbeard and Sabnzbd+ running on it, and I would have to choose the OS. linux, Windows server, WHS? It'll need to have Raid 5 software support, It needs to be able to run my Drobo, and I would have to resetup my Boxee shares etc...
So much faf, and at the end I would be in pretty much the same place I am now, but with another box.

I still want one though.

Do they offer WHS 2011 yet?

I'd put in a vote for WHS, personally. Although if you buy WHSv2 you won't have dynamic drive extender support, which is a bit sucky, but you might not care as you have a Drobo.

Which all those OSs do, of course.

Doesn't the Drobo mount as a normal mass storage device over USB or Firewire? Because again, all those OSs will do that.

Which takes a few seconds, it's true.

These boxes are naked, with no OS. My mates are running WHSv1 on them.

Yup, I know all the OS options can do what I want, which makes it more difficult to choose Wasn't sure if WHS had Raid 5 though, Windows 7 doesn't and I had heard rumours of WHS only doing Raid 1? Seems to be difficult to find this stuff out on the web for some reason, I suspect i'm just looking in the wrong place.

The Drobo does mount as a USB storage, but you need to be able to run the dashboard software if you want to do anything other than just use it as a hard drive. i.e. reboot it, update it, etc...

WHSv1 doesn't do RAID anything. It has proprietary drive-extender stuff in place. On a folder-by-folder basis, you mark if it should be duplicated or not; basically toggling it between RAID-0 and RAID-1 except split over all the drives in the server. New drives can be added at any time. It ends up being quite similar to the Drobo. One important weakness: the OS is always on a single drive. If this fails (and this happened to me), you have to do a reinstall, although it scans for and rebuilds data from the other partitions in the process.

WHSv2 did away with this, and went back to traditional software RAID.

Well, WHS is just Windows Server, so it'd likely be fine for that.

Craster

I can see WHS 2011 on my MSDN, not sure if it is 'live' yet.

Oh, it's live. I was just wondering if anyone was shipping it with systems.

Hmm... sounds interesting, but mildly expensive in terms of drive costs if it basically does straight duplication. I'm assuming I can just plug in my Drobo and use it as it currently is, without having to add it to the WHS storage, as I suspect that way lies dragons. Plus I don't want to lose the data I currently have on the drobo...

We have moved house, and the ADSL modem-router is now further away from the TV than before. I want to set things up a bit better, and more neatly this time, so rather than running multiple cables from my (crappy, telco supplied) router to the back of the telly I was considering running one cable, and then having some sort of hub or switch behind the TV so that I could plug in the HTPC and the 360, and any other stuff that might go in there (the TV and Blu-ray player have ethernet connections, but the content is pretty lousy and the interface clunky, so I probably won't bother with them).

Would using a hub/switch thingy like this work (I'm thinking yes)? Would it work well enough for some gaming and streaming media? Would I need to fiddle about much with router settings (I'm hoping not too much)? What's the proper name for the device I'm talking about?

I currently have 4 things I want wired in (big PC, HTPC, 360, NAS). Streaming over the wireless didn't work too well when I tried it last night.

That post reads quite poorly, sorry.

A switch would work fine. I'd avoid hubs if you're streaming media around as they're a little bit 'dumber' with regards to traffic

Cool, ta.

Any recommendations? I'm not after anything fancy, but also want to avoid something completely shit.

http://www.play.com/PC/PCs/4-/3309074/N ... fer=search

I use one of these... it does the job.

You're not going to have have to spend much unless you're wanting gigabit speeds, which I suspect your router doesn't do. Stay away from the no-name chinese types (switches have been known to get hot) and you'll be fine. Kov's suggestion is a good one.

Kov does good?

I have a gigabit router now, so I might upgrade my switch later.

But a jump from £14 to £50 is a bit

A what now?

Bloody networks.


WiFi is disabled in the Airports, because it's flaky in this house, and the Microserver doesn't have WiFi.

The Kitchen Airport has been rock solid since the sparkies did work the other week - hours of glitch-free streaming at a time. The bedroom one works too.

The Living Room one, on the other hand, vanishes from iTunes/Remote/Airport Utility the instant I try to stream to it. I did manage to get it to stream an album the other evening, but then when I started something else it disappeared again. The LED stays solid green, and the HomeHub sees it connected to the network - but I have to power cycle it to get it to reappear (and it vanishes again next time I stream to it).

Dodgy Airport, right? Wrong - switching the Bedroom and Living Room units, the behaviour remains location consistent, not Airport consistent. They're the same 7.6 firmware, connected to the same model of amp by the same model of optical cable and 3.5mm adaptor. Both locations have good airflow.

I don't get how adding an extra HomePlug step can increase reliability from "Near zero" to "near perfect" - but it looks like Airport Expresses don't like being plugged directly into a BT HomeHub 3. Fucksake. So now I'm going to have to try moving the router from here to next to the HomeHub, and if that doesn't help moving DHCP server duties over too. Then setting fire to something.

Considering how networks work, my brain flops from "why don't they just fucking work all the time" to "I don't understand how they could ever work".

Especially when voodoo like the above happens.

Windows Home Server - Do I need it? Is it worth replacing a Win7 install? Why do I mess with stuff that works fine?

No, you dont need it.

HTH, HAND, BOLLOCKS

Depends.Depends.Dunno.

HTH, HAND.

Sweet. Urge passing.

And... it's gone. As you were.

I got a Windows Home Server, and it's a vital part of my home network. The first thing I did was remove all the Windows Home Server components from it, however.

So now it's just a

What do you use it for that my NAS box can't do(srs qn)?

My NAS box has a DLNA media server (or whatever), torrent client and file sharing (obv) (and a print and email server which I don't use).

Run Sickbeard and SABNZBD+, run my nightly backups to dropbox, run my Squeezebox server (might be possible on a NAS). The first two are the important ones.

The major advantages of my WHS over a NAS unit are;

1) drive expansion -- I have four bays, which are all consolidated to a single big volume in the software. I can add and remove drives at will.
2) per-volume redundancy -- some of my stuff is mirrored across drives, some isn't. Can toggle this on the fly.
3) flexible software -- mine runs Couch Potato, sabnzbd, Sick Beard, for example.
4) can shell onto box and move files locally -- handy for moving 10 gig+ files around on the box without having to pull them down to and back up from a client
5) can put disks in any other computer and read them, so I've a bit more confidence that I can recover if the hardware goes pop
6) much more CPU and RAM grunt -- makes some DLNA transcoding tasks feasible (can your NAS handle 1080p?) and makes big unRAR jobs much faster
7) probably more I've forgotten.

Aha -- as Cras says, be an offsite backup host.