I did this a few days ago, installed Firefox on my WHS and now I have my always on Web box. The question is, is this a bad idea? after all, WHS does give you a nice warning when you first boot regarding using the PC directly i.e. not via the connector software.

There are other options of course, I could install Sandboxie and run the browser in a Sandbox, or even install a virtual OS, both of these options should protect WHS from harm.

Anyway, any thoughts on using WHS (or any server for that matter) as a web box?

I installed Win 7 build 7000 on an old Shuttle SN41G2, this is very old tech by today’s standards:

• NForce 2 motherboard
• Athlon 2200
• 1Gb RAM
• NVidia GeForce MX440 onboard graphics

Windows 7 runs very well on this hardware, although some of the Aero effects don’t seem to be enabled, probably due to the onboard graphics not supporting DirectX 9 (not even sure it supports v8).

The first thing I did was to browse to my WHS home page, when you do this with a networked PC that does not have the WHS connector installed you are directed to install the Connector from your server, I did this and the Connector installed with no issues. I then performed a manual backup, which worked without any issues. After backing up Win 7 I logged onto WHS via the console and noticed that it’s listed as “Windows Vista Ultimate Edition”.

I then turned off the PC, placed the WHS restore CD in the drive and booted, I then simply followed the prompts (see images below). The one issue I knew I would have would be due to the lack of certified Vista drivers for my PCs network card. I was prompted to insert a USB stick or floppy with the relevant drivers, I did this and then the restore continued. I was then prompted for my WHS password, and then asked which PC I wanted to restore (the default was This PC, i.e. Win 7). In all the restore took about 40 mins, it would have been quicker but I’m using 100mbit LAN. Then it was done, I rebooted and Win 7 was back. As far as I can tell there have been no issues at all.

It’s holiday time, and my usual diet of US Sci-Fi has all but dried up, there’s nothing but tat on the telly, so I’m planning on installing some add-ons and writing some blog posts. Any suggestions?

Cost

The Wind Desktop is not available in the UK, so I had a mate buy it in the US, and another mate bring it back for me, the cost of the barebones system was £92 (purchased from NewEgg). The system then required memory and some storage, I opted for a 2GB SODIMM for the RAM, this is overkill for WHS, but as I might use the Desktop for WinXP in the future I decided to go for 2GB. I also bought a 500GB SATA HD from a mate for £20, and then borrowed an identical HD so I could test the WHS with 2 drives. The Wind Desktop only has 2 SATA channels, one for a HD and one for an optical drive, I wanted to make sure there were no issues when 2 HD’s were used. The hardware details are listed below (all prices include VAT and delivery)

The DVD drive was only required to install WHS, so this can be deducted from the total. The total is therefore £235 (Hardware £140, Software £95). You can see from this that if you wanted to build a Linux server, or just a Linux desktop, the MSI Wind Desktop is a nice cheap platform. It’s a pity that WHS costs so much.

Power

To test the amount of power being used I run with a single Hard Disk and with 2 Hard Disks, for both configurations I tested it idling and while performing a backup.

Initial Conclusions

After doing some reading online I was expecting the power when idle to be closer to 20W, even so, it’s using about a 1/3 of the juice as my old WHS. I think my next step will be to have a look in the bios and in Windows Power Management to see if I can shave a few Watts off.

Photos

WHS console showing 2×500GB Hard Drives

Open case showing the Motherboard and the 2nd Hard Drive

Closed case running with a single Hard Drive, sitting on top of my 2 Shuttle SN41G2s

A side effect to the recent Netbook craze is the recent appearance of Nettops (20W – 30W PCs typically based on Intel’s Atom CPU), in particular the $150 (£80) MSI Wind barebones desktop has the potential to be a small, low power, and almost silent WHS. Currently not available in the UK, I’m hoping to get my hands on one from the US during September.

I’ll be planning on keeping the build as cheap as possible so will be buying just RAM (probably 2Gb just in case I eventually use it as a browsing PC), I’m hoping that the parallel IDE will be suitable for my two existing hard drives. Looks like I was getting my motherboards mixed up, I was working off an image of the new Shuttle X27 board which does indeed have an IDE connector, but the Wind does not, so it looks like I’m on the scrounge for a couple of SATA drives. I’ll use an optical drive to install WHS and then remove this once the install is complete.

If anyone has used their Wind desktop with WHS, or even with 2 parallel SATA HD’s I’d like to hear how you got on.

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When we originally moved home we decided to give the lounge a lick of paint. It was a little “tatty” and the plaster work was not brilliant, but it was perfectly acceptable. As we were planning on living here for quite some time we decided to do a proper job and get the walls re-skimmed before we repainted. This then progressed to having all the existing plaster work removed and basically dry lining, i.e. taking the walls back to the brick and starting from scratch.

We removed the plaster work ourselves which took about 3 days. It was at this point that I started to regret the whole thing. But, there was an upside to all this work. One of the walls in the lounge was a stud wall, and behind that was my computer room, almost the prefect setup for a Home Cinema wall, with all the media boxes being located in the computer room behind. So the planning began…….

As the media boxes were to be hidden away I wanted the speakers to be flush with the wall, after some research and many discussions with my Audiophile friends I opted for a set of Monitor Audio Bronze in-walls.

After the plasterboard had been removed from the wall, and the studs revealed it was time for a little “stud rearranging” (while carefully making sure that the wall integrity was not compromised!).

I made cardboard cutouts of the speakers and the TV so that I could position them on the wall, and check that the heights were comfortable for viewing. After much contemplation I decided on a 40″ LCD, even though the wife suggest we buy a 46″, as the viewing distance would be only 3m I decided that 40″ would be more than enough. This was going to be our main TV, and not a separate TV for movies, so we had to watch Neighbours on this, as well as blockbuster movies! After the studs had been moved to accommodate the speakers and TV stand I then had to cut holes for all the cables.

The plasterboard on the ceiling was left in place, and we opted to “overboard” i.e. place new boards on the existing boards. To do this channels had to be cut in the existing boards so that the cables for the rear speakers and sub would then sit between the two boards. When fixing the new boards we had to take care so as not to screw through the speaker cables.

Once the ceiling had been over-boarded it was then time to cut the holes for the rear speakers. This was done with a JigSaw.

The majority of the work we could do ourselves was then over, and it was now time for the plasterer to start fixing the plasterboards. In order to bring the Home Cinema wall inline with an existing brick wall it had to be brought forward a few inches, this was done by adding 3 layers of plasterboard, this also gave the speakers a more rigid structure to sit in than a single layer plasterboard wall.

Once the plasterer boarded the Home Cinema wall I then had to cut the holes for the front speakers. I’d taken photos and made a lot of measurements of the stud locations in the wall before it was boarded to make sure that the holes I cut were in the correct place.

The plasterer then completed boarding the rest of the room and then skimmed the walls and ceiling (and a top job he did!). After a few days the skim was dry enough to be painted. The speakers have a matt finished and have been designed to be painted, but as the walls were magnolia I opted to leave the speakers in their natural white colour.

After the paint had dried I then fitted the rear speakers. These speakers were 7″ deep, and had obviously been designed to make maximum use of the space provided in the ceiling. They fitted snuggly into the holes and fixed in place easily (the build quality of all the speakers was excellent). I had no idea at this point if the cables which were sandwiched between the two plasterboard layers were still intact.

It was now time to tackle the stud wall. I was a little nervous to say the least, I didn’t want to mess up a newly plastered wall by cutting in the wrong place. Eventually I made the initial cut for the left speaker, and all seemed to go well. I continued to cut the holes for the other speakers.

The one issue I did have was that the wall thickness (3 layers of plasterboard) was too thick for the speaker fixtures, so I had to cut notches out of the 1st layers of boards, not a big problem but it was a little time consuming. Once this had been done it was then time to put the speakers in place. Again they fitted snuggly and the fixings worked well and seemed to hold the speakers firmly in place.

I then had to cut the hole that would eventually take the cables running out the back of the TV. The position of this hole was critical as it coincided with a hole in the slimline TV bracket. Once the hole had been cut I knew it was in the correct position as it revealed 5 pieces of string which I had hung inside the wall, they were to be used if there were issues with feeding cables down through the wall (which there were!). The project then had to be “parked” so that the carpet fitters could come and do their job, this was OK as at this point I still had not bought a TV!

My original choice for a TV was the Samsung M87 40″, but while I was waiting the M87 was replaced by the Series 5. Then I wondered into Currys (just to look, I was obviously never going to buy anything from there), and they had the 40″ series 6 (LE40A656A)with a Samsung BluRay player (the BD-P1500) for £999, which at the time was a very good deal (it has since dropped in price again, as these things do), what was I supposed to do, so I bought it.

After hanging it on the wall I was glad I went for the 40″ rather than the 46″. Maybe if the TV were only a few inches think then a larger set would have been OK, but given the depth, it already dominates the wall. I had to buy 90° degree HDMI connectors so that they did not bash into the wall, and it was a real pain getting the cables through the wall, but hopefully that’s not something I will have to do very often.

I was still missing a sub, as it turned out a mate was selling a REL Quake for a very reasonable price, so I took it off his hands. I must admit that I was quite impressed when I watched my first BluRay, I knew HiDef was a step difference in image quality but I’m still impressed every time I watch it.

After putting up with Sky SD via a Scart for about a week I invested in SkyHD. The only thing I’m now missing is my all-in-one remote control, as the media boxes are out of sight I need something that will do RF to IR. My plan is to go for the Logitech Harmony 895 (890 pro in the US).

I’m quite happy with the result of the work, I hadn’t put in the planning and research that I would normally do as the Home Cinema was just a part of a much bigger project i.e. the Lounge, which included an Oak floor, Granite Hearth etc, but overall I’m very pleased with it. I’ve since signed up with LoveFilm and I’m trying to get through as many BluRay movies as I can while on my 3 month free trial . I’ve also pre-ordered The Matrix trilogy and Band-of-Brothers on BuRay.

Here’s a photo of what’s coming.

What did the OWL tell me? Well, when my home is in “standby” mode, i.e. overnight or when I’m away, it was using about 260W. The OWL also told me that of this 260W about 90W was due to my Windows Home Server. Not bad I thought, that’s less than a typical light bulb. The problem is of course that it’s using this power all day, everyday. Time for some maths (or “math” if my mate Jason is reading this):

The assumptions:

1. Electricity costs 10p per KWh.
2. WHS uses 90W.
3. WHS is always on.
4. Annual usage for a home is 3500KWh.
5. Annual bill for a home is £350 (3500KWh@10p/KWh).

Using the above assumptions, we get the following results for running a WHS for a year:

1. It uses 788KWh.
2. It costs £79 per year.
3. It’s responsible for 23% of the total electricity usage.

It’s quite a surprise to think that something that uses less power than a typical light bulb can be responsible for nearly a 1/4 of your electricity bill. Of course this case is specific to my WHS, which runs on an old Shuttle PC. A system built from scratch could be designed with low-power consumption in mind.

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In the office servers are kept in the “server” room, with the noticeable exception of probably only a handful of people (Mr Gates?) most people don’t have a server room at home (we can only dream). Given that the home server is meant to be used but not really seen it makes sense to hide it away somewhere, as I use a Shuttle for my WHS there is some fan noise so I don’t like to have it in my study where I keep my desktop PC. There is one snag with hiding it away in a far away room, and that’s that WHS has to be connected to the router via a cable, wireless is not an option. I could of course also hide my router away with the WHS, but I’m an old fashioned guy and I like my desktop PC to be connected via cable to the router. So, I like my PC to be connected via a cable, and WHS has to be connected via a cable, so that kinda limits where it can go, the wife would not be pleased with network cable trailing up the stairs to the server room….sorry, the spare bedroom.

There is another option, and this involves using HomePlugs. HomePlugs allow network devices to communicate using the existing power lines within your home. You’ll need a pair, and they’ll set you back about £45 ($90). Before I splashed out the cash I borrowed a pair of HomePlugs (eConnect Turbo) from my mate Tony, if you don’t know a Tony, then try other friends, the geekier the better (try an Andy, or a Dave), don’t bother asking any girls, at best you’ll be wasting your time, at worst you’ll spend 1/2 a day trying to explain the technology behind network transmissions over power lines, and how cool you think it is (by the way, this will not help you pull).

Anyway, I managed to get my hands on a pair of HomePlugs, spec’d to work at 85Mbit/s. I knew they were never going to reach this transfer rate, but I was still interested in seeing if it worked at all. My main concern was the fact that I wanted to put my WHS in my annexe, which had a separate consumer unit to the main house, so not exactly on the same ring main. To my surprise it worked, it was truly plug and play.

As for the transfer rate, it was not great, typically around 1.2MB/s (about 10Mbit/s, so quite a bit below the maximum of 85Mbit/s), but more than enough for streaming a Divx Movie (typically less than 0.3MB/s). Not really a perfect solution for moving around large files though. I’m using WHS as part of the 120-day trial, if I finally decide to take the plunge and buy WHS then I think it will be time to get out the drill and buy some cable (assuming Tony doesn’t have any spare of course)

As for the answer to my own question, “where do you keep your WHS?”, I keep mine on the kitchen floor in my annexe.

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