As I mentioned about 8 months ago, I purchased an HP MediaSmart Server with the intention of making it the hub of my home network. It’s been a bit of an interesting ride, so I thought I’d bring you up to date on that project.

The box came with 512MB of RAM and a 500 GB hard drive. I knew 500GB wasn’t going to be enough to backup my existing computers, much less provide any additional storage, so I bought a 1TB internal drive along with the machine and installed that right after the initial setup, giving me a total of 1.5TB of storage.

I moved my music files and some other archives to the home server to free up some space on my main desktop machine, but otherwise, just set up that machine, my laptop, netbook, and my wife’s laptop to be backed up to the home server nightly. I’ve since replaced the desktop machine, but not before copying its data to the home server.

As a storage platform and automatic backup system, the home server works pretty well. I created shares on the server for music, photos, software installs, and user data then mapped drives on each of the machines to those shares. Windows Explorer simply sees them as drives and file transfers are quick and easy via the network.

I’ve learned a few things along the way, some of which were surprising. The big surprise was learning that if you let Windows automatically update on the home server it will spontaneously reboot itself when the update calls for it. I’ve since told it to download the updates and let me know they’re ready. I had hoped to be able to work on documents directly on the server, but this little “feature” makes it necessary to have a copy on the local machine and update the server as changes are made.

The first time I encountered this one I was, of course, in the middle of editing a document that was stored on the server. I was able to recover without a major data loss, but it was not one of the fonder memories I have of the home server! I had thought perhaps setting the Windows updates to notify instead of automatic would eliminate the problem, but no such luck. It still reboots occasionally, although it’s always around midnight so if I’m paying attention I can anticipate it.

Another thing I learned was that the server is a real worry wart! There are three status levels: normal/healthy (green), needs attention (yellow) and “Omigod the sky is falling!” (red). The latter is accompanied by dire messages like “your network health is critical!” Not only that, the normally blue status LED on the front of the box (which stays blue in “condition yellow”, go figure) changes to red, apparently to get your attention.

There are all kinds of things that trigger a yellow alert. If a machine known to the server hasn’t been backed up in 7 days or more, warning messages begin displaying saying “[name of machine] hasn’t been backed up since [date of last backup]. Your network health is at risk!” Since my machines aren’t all turned on and connected to the network 24/7, this happens a lot.

When this situation occurs, I have three choices: ignore the incessant warning messages, connect the designated machine to the network and back it up, or go into the Home Server Console and tell it to ignore the situation. If a machine isn’t likely to be used for a while, I’ll do the latter just to shut the server up and hopefully turn the yellow tray status icon back to green, at least for a while.

It becomes a sort of game to see how long you can keep the status icon green. You have to become resigned to the fact that it will be yellow quite often. There’s almost always something the thing isn’t happy about!

There’s apparently something a little flakey about my 1TB server hard drive. The past couple of months I’ve been getting “File conflicts” messages. These are yellow alerts, too. File conflicts are not a good thing, and in my case have been indicating that there’s an error on the hard drive. Maybe it’s a bad sector, maybe something else, I’m not sure and I haven’t had the time to dig into it and diagnose it properly.

I’ll occasionally get a red alert that the drive is “unhealthy” which tells me to “repair” it. Back to the Windows Home Server Console to run the Repair function on the drive. This is very likely good old CHKDSK, but it does seem to repair the problems which warning about possible data loss. A successful repair will turn the status icon green…until it discovers that the file conflicts are still there.

This last time, it was a set of four files which apparently were listed in the directory but didn’t really exist. I went in to the share on a connected machine and deleted them. That wasn’t good enough, the file conflict messages continue. The drive reports healthy, however, so there’s no option to run Repair again. –sigh–

I’ve mentioned the Windows Home Server Console. This bit of software until recently took performance to a new low. I’ve seen glaciers move faster!

Seriously, the login nearly always failed the first time (“Cannot connect to your server”). Clicking the OK button generally logged in, but it took several minutes for that to happen. Once in, clicking on any of the toolbar buttons required waiting another few minutes (not seconds, mind you, minutes!). Eventually, something would happen as a result of the mouse click, then the cycle would start over again if another mouse click was needed.

In trying to troubleshoot that phenomenon, I learned that you can access the server via Remote Desktop just like a “real” Windows machine! Doing so, however, is less productive than you might think. For one thing, when you log in, Internet Explorer pops up and delivers a dire warning that bypassing the WHS Console can have dire consequences (you could screw something up royally) and you really shouldn’t be doing this. Suffice to say that working directly in the server is not for the faint of heart and you’d better know what you’re doing to avoid catastrophe.

Within the past several weeks, the WHS Console has magically become fairly usable. Gone are the multi-minute reaction times. While performance is nowhere near snappy, it’s at least tolerable. You know that when you click something, you’ll see a response in this lifetime. The login even works the first time…usually. Whoever fixed this has my undying gratitude!

The MediaSmart Server isn’t really designed to be what I had in mind, but I’m adapting to it. If nothing else, the automatic backups are a major plus. Now I just have to implement a plan to backup the server itself!

John The Geek

The Amazon Kindle is basically an electronic book. Amazon calls it a “Wireless Reading Device.” The Kindle has been on the market about a year now. I recall looking at it when it was introduced and thinking it was a very cool idea.

Well, now it’s a year later and I own a Kindle. And it’s very cool.

The first thing you notice about a Kindle is the “electronic paper” screen. It’s essentially black-on-white and the detail is very sharp. Text is crisp and very readable even in bright daylight outside. There are a number of screen saver pictures that come with the Kindle and these are very detailed, looking very much like fine etchings.

Operation of the Kindle is straightforward. On the left side are Previous Page and Next Page buttons. On the right, a Next Page button and a small Back button. A small scroll wheel below the bottom right corner of the screen controls the cursor and menu system. Push the wheel to click, roll it to scroll the cursor.

The Kindle has a headphone jack for listening to music or audiobooks, a USB port for transferring content from your PC to the Kindle and vice-versa, and an AC jack to recharge the battery. At the bottom of the screen are indicators for remaining battery charge and wireless connectivity.

Battery life is impressive. I’ve gotten 3-4 days from full charge to half discharged with it on 24/7. I’ve not run the battery all the way down. Amazon warns not to do that, but to keep it topped off. I’m still a Ni-Cad guy so I can’t bring myself to plug it in every night, but when it gets to the halfway mark, I’ll charge it back up.

The Kindle is on the Whispernet wireless network, aka Sprint. I get 4-5 bars of signal strength everywhere I’ve been with it so far. The wireless is fast. A 1.5-2MB Kindle book downloads in a few seconds.

The Kindle has about 180MB of available internal memory, good for a hundred or so books in Kindle format. There is an SD card slot to add more storage. I have a 4GB card in mine which will hold literally thousands of books and documents. The Content Manager allows you to move items from internal memory to the SD card and vice-versa, or delete items altogether.

If you purchase a book from the Kindle Store, it is delivered to your Kindle via the wireless and also stored in your online Media Library at Amazon. This means if you run out of space on your Kindle and have to remove something to make more room, you can redownload it from the Media Library at any time when you have more available space.

In addition to the content you purchase from the Kindle Store, you can convert various files to Kindle format. At the moment, Microsoft Word documents are supported along with MP3s, JPGs and a few others. PDF documents are in the experimental stage. I’ve converted several PDFs and the results have been varied, but this looks very promising. One thing I intend to try soon is to convert a PDF to Word using Adobe Acrobat and then having the Kindle convert the Word doc.

Conversion is simple. Just email the file(s) you wish converted as attachments to the email address given you when you register your Kindle. There are actually two addresses, one of which is free. The difference is that the paid address delivers the converted document directly to the Kindle via the wireless. The free version stores the documents on Amazon’s servers and sends you an email with links to download them to your computer. You then transfer the downloaded files to your Kindle via USB cable.

As of this writing, the paid conversion address has not been charging the 10 cents they say they will charge for the service, but eventually I expect they will. The conversion fee isn’t unreasonable and IMO is easily justified in the time savings avoiding the download/upload cycle.

Not all books are available in Kindle format yet, but they’re certainly working on it. If you find a book on Amazon that isn’t in Kindle format, there’s a link next to it to tell the publisher you’d like them to publish it for the Kindle. I’ve been doing that with computer books as some of my favorite publishers aren’t putting out Kindle editions yet.

Purchasing content from the Kindle store is straightforward. You activate 1-Click ordering on your Amazon account and all your Kindle purchases are processed via 1-Click. There is a Search capability where you can search the Kindle Store from your Kindle by keying in search terms from the keyboard. The Kindle keyboard is a typical QWERTY layout, but the keys are very small buttons. Not all the punctuation marks are present, but when you need one, you press the Sym key which brings up a menu of them.

Thankfully, the period, forward slash and @ symbols are on the keyboard. Web surfing is available albeit in experimental mode and pretty much limited in usefulness to mostly-text web sites.

I leave my Kindle on 24/7 by putting it in sleep mode. If it’s idle with no activity for 10 minutes it will go into sleep mode by itself. There is a two-key combination to put it to sleep or wake it up depending on its current state. I also leave the wireless turned on although this probably consumes a bit more battery power than with it off.

In addition to books, you can purchase newspaper and blog subscriptions for your Kindle. All the major newspapers are available and well over 1,000 blogs as of this writing. I signed up for two sports blogs for 99 cents per month each. Whenever anything new is posted to the blogs, it shows up as a new item on my Kindle home page immediately.

I definitely love my Kindle! It’s allowing me to take reading material with me where it’s too cumbersome to carry a book or two and I can grab 10 or 15 minutes of reading as I get time during the day. If all my computer books were somehow transferable to the Kindle, I’d save a good percentage of the space in my home office! Hey, it’s nice to dream.

John The Geek

About a year ago I saw an announcement that Microsoft was soon to launch an operating system called Windows Home Server. I was immediately intrigued because I’d been wanting a way to centralize my file storage so that I could keep all my data in one place and access it from any of my computers without having to have copies of everything on all the machines.

I discovered that WHS provided that and much more. Here’s a short list of its capabilities:

• Central shared file storage
• Automatic backup of all computers attached to it
• Remote access via the Internet
• Media streaming to compatible devices on the network
• Sharing of photos and videos with family and friends right from the server

I decided this was an ideal solution to my problem. My original plan was to purchase the software and convert my old desktop machine into a Home Server. This turned out to be a problem, however, when Windows Home Server was suddenly backordered and not available for quite a long time.

I eventually gave up and purchased an HP MediaSmart Server which comes with Windows Home Server. This was actually a better solution as the MediaSmart Server has four drive bays while my desktop machine only has two.

The HP box came with a 500GB hard drive already installed. Since my desktop machine has a total of 415GB of disk in it, I knew I’d need more disk capacity in the server. I purchased a 1TB internal hard drive to install in it. I already have three external USB 500GB drives which I can add to the server via its USB ports, if I choose to.

I set the server up last weekend and got it running. I installed the Windows Home Server client software on my desktop machine first in order to get the server configured and the software updated. This was very easy to do and went quite smoothly.

Next, I installed the Windows Home Server connector on my laptop. Now I can administer the server from either machine and transfer files to the server and access the files from both machines.

The only glitch I’ve encountered so far is that the desktop machine refuses to backup to the server. The C: drive in the desktop machine apparently has some errors on it and Windows Home Server won’t back up the disk with errors. I’m still working on getting the errors cleared up so the server can back up the desktop automatically. Stay tuned for further developments on that situation.

I still need to enable remote access, get the extra hard drives installed, and get the rest of my data files transferred to the server. Once all that’s done, I will get the desktop and laptop set up to backup automatically to the server every night. I’ll post more on those activities as they happen.

I’ve also found a blog dedicated to Windows Home Server users: http://www.wegotserved.co.uk

So far, I’m happy with my server setup. If you have a lot of data and several computers that all need to access it, you’ll want to seriously consider a solution like this.

John The Geek