Contents tagged with Windows Home Server
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Restored 64-bit Windows 7 Beta from Windows Home Server Backup on a DELL Laptop
The HD of the new DELL Precision M4400 I have crashed, burned and died yesterday. I heard the screams 3 rooms away while drinking my morning coffee. It was horrific. Luckily it was powered on during the night, so the Windows Home Server (WHS) had a full backup. Had a few probs though:
- the recovery cd didn’t have network drivers for my LAN card
- the drivers stored in the special folder on the backup were 64-bit, which isn’t supported by the recovery cd (DUH!!)
- had to download 32-bit drivers from DELL and put on USB drive
Tip: make sure your c-drive matches the size of the backup, and create a “dummy” FAT recovery partition on your new HD which mimics the DELL RECOVERY partition. Also, make sure your USB drive is disconnected once you don’t need it anymore. Make sure it’s disconnected before you finish the backup. Also, eject the recovery cd when rebooting, just to be sure! I had to do the restore 3 times before it managed to make my c-drive bootable! Quite annoying…
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Running ASP.NET MVC on Your Windows Home Server
Right, so I ran the new Web Platform Installer 2.0 Beta on my WHS and it seems (so far) to have worked out quite well. I created a new MVC website with File->New… and published it over to an MVC-directory on WHS (I have set that up earlier, with a file share and everything).Now, the version of IIS on Windows Home Server is IIS 6 (because WHS runs on Windows 2003 kind of), so ASP.NET MVC won’t work right out of the box. I was hoping that the Web Platform Installer would have taken care of that, but apparently not.
Phil Haack wrote a long, and very detailed blog post about how to set things up on IIS 6, so I’m following that, adding support for the .mvc extension, changing the routes in Global.asax and so on, and voila it works:
Now, I want to set up extension-less URL’s, which is prettier than having to have that .mvc extension in the URL. Phil cover this in his blog post as well, so I’m adding wildcard mappings, and here goes:
Isn’t that just great? I love my home server, maybe I can host my Writespace Clickonce installer on my own server? Not too worried about the load on the server :)
Watch this space for some sample stuff that will be located on my own server *big grin*
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Web Platform Installer 2.0 Beta on Windows Home Server
I’ve been thinking of setting up ASP.NET MVC 1.0 on my WHS and also start learning some Silverlight stuff, so I took a risk, went to the Microsoft Web Platform Installer page and clicked on the Beta 2.0 link. Downloaded the installer, marked ASP.NET MVC and the most necessary options and let it go. Should work, right?It had to reboot once to get Windows Installer 4.5 in, but it continued to chew on and after a few minutes:
Yay! Now I just have to get an MVC test application on there somehow… brb.
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Windows Home Server Learnings - Don't Install the HP Add-Ons
This is a general warning to Windows Home Server owners in general and HP Media Smart Server owners in particular. The "Power Pack 1" update to WHS comes with 2 add-ons:
- McAfee’s Total Protection Service (anti-virus/anti-malware)
- PacketVideo’s PVConnect Media Server (media sharing)
But unless you've gone through the hard work to actually upgrade the memory from 521MB to 2GB, don't install these add-ons because you may end up with a totally unusable home server. The hardware just isn't up to it! PVC alone requires 512 MB.
I actually tried to installed PVConnect and the first thing I noticed was that the WHS Console was quite non-responsive and sluggish it it's behavior. Then I clicked the PVConnect "tab" and got this, in spanish!?!
After a while I got tired of it and went to install it, which wasn't easy because of the non-responsive console. Eventually I got rid of it, but not without blood shed:
Like the missing/transparent/black features? :) Anyway, I clicked the white (that I presume said "OK") button and the Console got reset. Now I was soon greated by the "Your WHS Network is at Risk" notification:
What risk? I log on to the WHS and to see what's wrong:
This health warning thingy in WHS is not making sense to me. What is there to warn about? Will this list be a mile long in a year? I need to clean this list up... does anyone know how to do it? BTW. The AV software on my mediacenter server IS NOT out of date...
There's a good story about this on Rafael's Within Windows blog.