Building a Windows Home Server – Craftsman Style, Part 3

Setting Up the Server

When I left off in Part 2, the cabinet was built, and the server had been assembled. The next step was to move it inside and install the Windows Home Server operating system.

In this photo, the cabinet is in place next to its existing buddy. Now my two desktop computers, along with the ADSL modem and gigabit router, are located on a desk on the opposite side of this office area. Since WHS must be wired to the network, and I didn’t want an ethernet cable running across the floor, I had to run a cable through the wall. Luckily the exterior of this wall has removable corrugated iron cladding. Removing and replacing it was a slightly stressful job, but worth it for the end result. I used Cat 5e cable for the run, as it was all I could buy by the metre. For some reason, Cat 6 cable was only available in 300m drums, slightly more than I required. Cat 5e is rated for gigabit ethernet, so no problem.

To install WHS, I put the drawer assembly on my computer desk and connected it to one of my monitors, and a borrowed keyboard and mouse. I attached a spare DVD drive I had in the cupboard with an IDE cable, and connected up the power supply. Now it was time for that magic moment that only happens once in a new computer build, first power up. I pushed the button. My blue power light came on, the drive spun up, the fans started and the monitor came to life. I pressed the DEL key to enter the BIOS to set up some initial parameters, ensured that the DVD and hard drive were recognized, and set the DVD drive as the first boot device. With every thing looking good, I put in the WHS installation DVD and rebooted. Then a problem. The Windows installer would start to load files, then quit with a read error. I checked the settings, checked the DVD drive setup, but still the same result. So I ripped a DVD burner out of one of my desktops and hooked that up. Installation proceeded normally, phew. But wait, what’s this, another error? This time, after its first reboot it gave a hard drive error. I had noticed the “press F6 to install third party drivers” message, and realized straight away what was wrong. Having been spoiled by Windows Vista, I had set the hard drive controller to run in AHCI mode and just expected the operating system to install. But WHS is based on Server 2003, and like Windows XP, requires AHCI drivers to be installed from a floppy disk at the F6 prompt (Note: I never checked it out at the time, but if your motherboard supports it, you may be able to set the BIOS to emulate a floppy using a flash drive). I considered just setting it to IDE emulation in the BIOS, but decided that was too easy (and requires foregoing hot swapping, NCQ and SATA 3Gb/s interface). I had a floppy drive, used perhaps twice in its life for the XP installations, so I plugged it in and hunted around for a disk. The only disks I could find were two I had used as “F6″ disks before. I downloaded the F6 floppy utility from the Intel website, plugged the drive into one of my desktops and made a new F6 floppy. Then back to the server, which promptly gave a floppy read error. Anyway, to cut a long story short, both disks turned out to be dodgy (just too old). I eventually found one that worked at my wife’s work place. Once these problems were sorted, the installation proceeded smoothly.

I was pleased to find that powered up, the server was very quiet, and inaudible once inside the cupboard with the door shut.

All powered up and running. The drawer is pulled out to access the power switch on the right hand side.

Installing and setting up the Connector software on my two PC’s was straightforward, and I soon had both computers backed up to the server for the first time. This first backup can take a while, but the daily incremental backups are fast.

Initially, because I was having a problem with a computer that would not sleep properly (see my post on “The Computer that Wouldn’t Sleep), and because I didn’t want to leave the computer on all night, I would turn the server on first thing in the morning, then turn the computers on and let the server back them up. This prompted me to finally solve the computer sleep problem. Now I leave the computers in an S3 sleep state over night, and let the server wake them early in the morning for a backup. To save even more power, I turn the server when I’m finished for the night, and have it turn itself on at 6am using the Wake on RTC Alarm function in the BIOS (as an aside, I really liked the Gigabyte board’s BIOS, it has much better explanations of the settings than the ASUS motherboards I’ve used).

So my overall impression of WHS so far? Well, I think it’s an excellent and very useful product. It’s a great shame its reputation was tarnished by that tricky data corruption bug, but hopefully Power Pack 1 will finally see an end to that. I was never as diligent as I should have been about backing up data, but now it’s automatically taken care of. And when we wanted to share a file between computers, we’d often copy it to a flash drive and hand it over! Now we just save it to the server, which feels just as fast as reading or writing to a different partition on your own hard drive, that’s how well it works over a gigabit network. And then there are the cool remote access features…but that’s enough from me.

I hope you’ve enjoyed reading about my experience, and maybe will be inspired to build your own server, if you haven’t already.

UPDATE: I’ve taken the final step and added the second hard drive, a Western Digital SE16 500GB model, and the installed Power Pack 2 release candidate. It’s all working well so far. To make room and keep things tidy I removed some of the unused cables from the power supply, terminating the cut ends with a 9-pin nylon connector so that I can used them in the future if necessary (d.i.y. cable management!).