Yesterday I received my new Acer easyStore server. For a while now I have been needing a new server and this one caught my eye with the competitive cost and the extra memory. For the same price of the HP home server I was able to get an extra 1.5 gigs of memory, which is perfect for me because I plan on doing more with it than just storing files. In this blog I describe the experiences I have had setting up my home server, such as my smooth initial setup, my troubles with PHP and MySql installation, but my overall satisfaction with the product.
There wasn.t a lot in the package, just the square black server, a couple network cables, a power cable and a starter manual. I was rather disappointed in the manual because it is very thick (around 300 pages) but only 50 of the pages are in English. The other 250 are other languages (from French to Japanese). The manual only covered the basic steps to start the server up but none of the details (like what type of hard drives can be supported by the server and how to connect the individual client machines.
For the better though, only 50 pages for the basics of the server ARE actually needed. I plugged everything in, hit the power button and BAM, it was on the network and I was connecting to it with the client software. As it turns out, you should have the client software installed on each of the machines that you want to connect to the server. You don.t really HAVE to install the client software on all machines but you probably want to because of the additional features that are supported with the client software (such as backing up all your files on a nightly basis, and accessing the home server from remote).
With the first machine that I installed the software on it asked me some additional questions, like what workgroup I want the server to be apart of, and what I want to name the server, etc. Once I configured the basics of the server it installed the software on my machine and I then it was done. I was then able to connect to the console of the server and perform standard maintenance actions, such as adding users.
I took a glance through the Settings screen and saw a number of interesting things, such as Add-Ins and IP Configuration. Since my old server died (hence my reasoning for buying this new server) I figured I should set the IP address to the same (static) ip address that my other server was set to. That was easy enough to do and was just like the standard windows IP configuration screen. Another interesting section was .Remote Access.. As it turns out you can register your windows home server with homeserver.com and get your own MYNETWORKNAME.homeserver.com address. I believe this is so that you can access your server from wherever you are (with your laptop) in the world. When turning this feature on I noticed two things.
- It required a windows live account. Fortunately I already have one of those that I have no problem using.
- It makes sure that your router is configured to forward ports for a number of different service like HTTP (for your server.s website) and Remote Desktop so that you can connect to your server using RDP.
There are two things that I am particularly curious about (but not a savvy enough administrator to know how to do) is
- Setup the server as a Domain server so that all my machines can have the same accounts and all machines can have the Documents directory on the server (instead of just backed up to the server).
- Setup the server to accept VPN connections so that when I am away on business I can VPN to my network and have the same network drives and all.
These would both be awesome additions to windows home server. Although, I.m sure though that the concept of VPN and Domains are far more complicated then a standard user would want to learn, which is probably why it isn.t included as a feature in WHS . so OH WELL.
The first thing that came to mind after I started transferring all my media/files to the server was the fact that sometimes when I try to watch a movie from my desktop on my PS3 it complains saying that the format is not valid for the PS3. I was able to solve this problem using the PS3 Media Server on my desktop so I thought I would give it a try on the server.
Next up, remote desktop. I was (just like any other machine) able to easily remote desktop into the server using the server Administrator account and password. The desktop looks just like you would expect with any others and windows home server is just like a regular machine. So I installed the PS3 media server without a problem, registered it as a service and vio.la, it works. What is nice here is that unlike my windows vista desktop, I don.t have to disable any UAC or anything in order to run the PS3 media server because windows home server doesn.t HAVE a UAC. That means I can re-enable the UAC on my desktop machine so that I don.t have to look at the annoying .Windows Security Center. pop-up warnings all the time, and I don.t have to see them on my new server either.
Eventually I am going to get around to install VMWare Server 2 on the server so that I can create and run some VMs. I am thinking this won.t work quite as well because there is only 2gigs of ram. I would prefer a VMWare server to have 4+ gigs of ram because I don.t think any VM should have less then 1 gig of ram allocated. We.ll see how it goes though. I am sure that I will be able to get the VMs started I just won.t be able to allocate too much memory to each of them. And I suppose as long as I only have one VM running at a time I can have 1gig of ram allocated to it. But, that only leaves 1 gig of ram to the entire home sever, so maybe not. I will have to watch the system resources to see how they are affected.
Transferring files was about as easy as you can imagine with ANY machine on the network (drag-and-drop). However, I wanted to just move my entire secondary hard drive over the server and just plug it in. I found out through some searching the owner manual on the client CD that when you install a new hard drive in the system it formats the hard drive and sets it up in the hard drive pook on the server. It seems that the server only registers one drive letter for all drives that are plugged into it and distributes the information accross the hard drives appropriately. That is also why the hard drive must be formatted because the file system has to be specially constructed on the hard drive. At least that.s what I gather out of it. This also led me to the discovery that only SATA hard drives are supported by the server. When you look in the back of the server you can clearly see that there are SATA ports and no IDE ports.
The biggest difficulty that I ended up having was installing PHP and MySql. When installing PHP the file system treated each of the PHP files seperately and created their own set of security permissions (even using the PHP installer). This made it a bit difficult to see that when I was changing the PHP directory’s permissions to include the IUSR_SERVER and IIS_WPG accounts for read&execute the files withing the directory weren’t getting updated, just the directory itself. This ended up causing permission problems when trying to view .php files on the server’s website.
Note: I was able to figure out the permissions problem by using the Filemon tool. This is one of the most helpful tools in the world as far as I’m concerned. A trick though, is that when you run Filemon you should specify a filter to only include “w3wp.exe”. This is the exe that IIS uses when serving webpages to client requests. Without the filter, there are FAR too many messages and it’s really hard to keep track of.
I had problems installing MySql too but was much less of a head-ache in the end: Whenever I tried to run the installer for MySql it would shut-down right away and say that the installer was interrupted. I was never able to figure out why this was happening and ended up installing MySql by just using the manual install, which is as easy as 1) extract files 2) setup .ini file (copy .ini to c:\windows\my.ini) and 3) run “mysqld –install” (which installs MySql as a service in windows).
Be careful when setting up virtual directories. Because I work on several different websites I wanted to setup a virtual directory for each of my websites that I could use for development. When creating the virtual directory you need to make sure that the virtual directory has (again) the appropriate permissions – the IUSR_SERVER and IIS_WPG users must have Read&Execute permissions. What was happening for me was I would create the virtual directory but it would say “404 – file not found” when trying to access it from the website. In the end this was just because IIS didn’t have permissions to look into the virtual directory folder.
All-in-all, I am loving my little home server. I am able to access it from anywhere in the world, it has lots of storage space to begin with, it is easy to configure and has already started backing up all my machines (one day later). For $400 this was a great buy.
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