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Last night my wife took me to the Met for dinner. Midway through dinner I glanced over at the adjoining table, and was quite surprised to see Jim Allchin, along with two other people.
And earlier in the day, I actually sat at the same table with another celebrity: Chris Sells, who was generously taking me out for lunch.
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Likely you've already seen this elsewhere, but if not, WHS has RTMed!
http://blogs.technet.com/homeserver/archive/2007/07/16/ship-it.aspx
Yes, it's been awhile since I posted. I've been running the "nearly" RTM bits for about a week now. Prior to this, my server was down for a month as I moved houses and am slowly rebuilding my computing infrastructure.
In other news of my WHS box, I finally figured out why it was so damn noisy. Wasn't the power supply after all. The box has 4 fans, two of which are well hidden. Good old "Divide & Conquer" debugging helped me figured that out.
Next stop: Frys to pick up some bigger, yet quieter case fans.
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In a previous post, I lamented the loss of SoftIce.
Now, we truly are at the end of an era.
Compuware is closing its development lab in New Hampshire. This is where tools like BoundsChecker, SoftIce, TrueTime, SmartCheck, CodeReview, and many others originated. (I won't attempt to name, them all, so please don't take offense if I didn't list a particular product. :-)
It's the lab where worked with many amazing folks. To name just some of the better known: John Robbins, Mark Russinovich, Russ Osterlund, Jay Hilyard. Geez... I know I'm forgetting more than I'm listing.
See http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/070611/clm093.html for details.
I still have quite a few friends there too.
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Yes, it's been awhile since I posted anything on this topic. My bad.
My WHS box is happily purring along in the closet. I took it down for a few days while I went through a whole memory upgrade experience. The details are unimportant. The net result: I should have just bit the bullet and paid a little more to have the box built with 1 GB from the beginning.
My status icon in the notification area is always red (Critical). This is because a couple of machines aren't being backed up. In one case, a notebook which used to be backing up nightly hasn't been auto-backed up for awhile. I've ensured that the laptop is awake during the backup window.
In another case, I upgraded my wife's laptop to Vista. However, WHS still lists the prior XP version of the machine alongside the Vista version. Of course, the XP "ghost" machine shows as non-contactable.
From the discussion boards, it sounds like these nits are fixed in post beta 2 builds. Now if I could just get my hands on one. :-)
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One of the cool features of IIS 7 is it's modular architecture. It lets you create just the IIS you want, with minimal attack surface area.
Alas, one of the greatest consumers of my time lately is determining why things no longer works like on IIS 6. This is almost always because yet another portion of IIS 7 wasn't installed by default.
Yesterday was spent trying to figure out why I got no ETW events from the "ASP.NET Events" provider. At times, I was literally stepping through the ETW tracing code in IIS. (Thank goodness for Source Server!) The LogMan command was reporting success in starting the session, and I always got the ETW "Header" event, but never any actual ASP.NET events.
The magic: You need to install "Tracing".
On Vista, go to "Control Panel | Programs | Programs and Features", then select "Turn Windows features on or off". The "Internet Information Services" node is where to start drilling.
Also, I hear from Eric Deily that under Windows Server 2007, you can get to this via the "Role Management Tool"
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Here's what it looks like when I'm at work, accessing my home network via Windows Home Server. I've blocked out certain private data.
Clicking on any of the machines starts up a Remote Desktop connection, which can be full screen or hosted in the browser. The first time you do this, you need to allow IE to run a control that handles the Remote Desktop aspect.
In other news, I broke down last night and ordered another 512MB for the box. Under basic load, it runs well on 512MB, and without any noticeable paging. However, things like remote access and indexing have pushed my memory usage to the 700MB range occasionally.
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This morning my wife was firmly ensconced on the couch with the puppy, catching up on her shows on Media Center.
Sensing some free time, I snuck upstairs and began poking around at getting remote access working with Windows Home Server.
The real magic came down to 2 main steps:
- Enabling port forwarding for three ports on my router
- Installing ISA Firewall client on my machine at work.
The port forwarding took awhile to figure out. On my Dlink router, forwarding is hidden under Advanced | Gaming. The WHS docs say that it will try to do this automatically, but it didn't work for my router at this point. Hopefully by RTM though!
As for the ISA Firewall client, if you're on the Microsoft corporate network, it's a given that you need to install it to connect to home machines. Don't ask me why or how. Networking has never been my strong point, and as long as things "just work", I'm happy to focus my time on other areas.
So here's how it played out: I had a Remote Desktop connection to my work machine on campus. From that session, I opened a browser and entered the externally visible IP address of my home router. Soon I was presented with a "Windows Home Server" login page.
At the WHS login page I entered my username/password for my home account. A new page appeared with three tabs:
- Home
- Computers
- Shared Folders
Clicking on the "Computers" tab, I saw the four machines on my home network. I selected my wife's laptop, and was prompted for her credentials. After entering them, a full screen Remote Desktop window appeared, and I was logged in to her machine. At that point I had to go drag my wife and puppy away from from the TV to show them. They were suitably impresed; my wife more so than the puppy.
Ponder for a second just a few of the machines involved in seeing my wife's desktop on the other side of the room:
- My home machine
- My work machine
- ISA Server at Microsoft
- Windows Home Server box in my downstairs closet
- Wife's laptop
Since I'd previously set up a dynamic DNS account, I then tried entering that name in my browser, rather than a hardcoded IP address. To my pleasant surprise, it worked right away.
With the basics in place, I've now created accounts for several family members in CA and AZ, and have given them read-only access to a few folders such as photos. Now if I could just get one of them to call me back, I'll be able to see how well it works in "the real world".
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(Switching away from WHS for the moment...)
In my current work life, I've been playing extensively with the Crimson APIs, which in Vista/Longhorn server attempt to unify the NT event log and ETW tracing.
From what I've heard, there was a major effort in recent years (i.e., Vista) to dramatically increase the amount of tracing in the OS infrastructure.
I'm not going to try to provide any sort of comprehensive overview here. Instead I'll throw out a couple of experiments to try on your own. WARNING: All these assume you're running Vista (and presumably also work on the Longhorn server beta).
If you only learn one thing from this post, it's this: The Wevtutil program is your new best friend. It's part of the OS, so no download needed.
- Want to see just how many instrumentation points there are in the OS? Run "wevtutil ep", which emits a list of "providers". On my system, well into the hundreds of providers show up.
- Want to see what sort of events a provider can emit? Run "wevtutil gp /ge:true /gm:true <providername>", where <providername> is one of the providers from the previous "ep" output.
- Bonus fun: Run "Event Viewer" (Eventvwr.exe). Drill down into "Applications and Services Logs". Keep drilling. In particular, "Microsoft", then "Windows". Does anything look familiar?
There's easily a dozen long blog posts of material from all this goodness. This is in no way a comprehensive post. Instead, consider it a couple of X's on a treasure map. The ambitious among you will find plenty of gold. :-)
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Andre asks:
what is the effective size of the server if i have 4 250GB disk?
is it 0.5TB or 1TB?
The short answer is "It depends". Specifically, it makes a difference what folders you enable duplication on. Worst case, your 1 TB of physical disk space will give you 500 GB of "logical storage". Best case: 1 TB.
For each folder (both predefined and user created) you have the option of specifying if the contents of that folder should be duplicated on another drive.
On my home machine, I have ripped music and photos folders set to duplicate. I've chosen not to duplicate my ripped DVD folder, as DVDs are quite large and I can alway re-rip.
In short, this isn't RAID. WHS has both advantages and disadvantages relative to RAID. One of the nice advantages of WHS is that you can add disks incrementally without requiring all disks to be the same size.
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Is here: http://blogs.technet.com/homeserver/
No real news on my own WHS box. Still hanging in there, dutifully doing backups every night on all four client machines. When I looked at the memory usage last night, it was hanging around 540MB, but didn't appear to be paging. (The machine has 512MB).
My next big hurdle is to configure the router/dynamic DNS stuff so that I have remote access. Other people here have it working. I always have the worst luck with networking, so I'm a little slow to jump on this part of the product. However, my brother is now pestering me for access to my old family photos, so that might be the impetus I need.
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No, you're not missing any posts. I've jumped from Day 4 to Day 8.
Last night WHS box passed the "Yep, still looking good" test, and got promoted to the dark closet beneath my stairway. No keyboard, mouse or monitor anymore. Just the AC cord and an ethernet cable. Don't cry because it's lonely though. It has company: The Media Center box that previously had the closet all to itself.
Later I used Remote Desktop connection to log into the server, and poke around. All looked good, and it was only using about 309 MB of committed memory. With indexing enabled, it does use a bit more, and I'll probably break down and buy another 512 MB of memory to keep it happy. I'll also likely need another UPS if I want power monitoring. If only there was some way to have one UPS communicate via USB cable with multiple machines...
Of my terabyte of storage, I've still got about 650 GB free. I have all my photos and music using "duplication", but my 33 ripped DVDs are in a non-duplicated folder.
Over the weekend, I also pointed the Media Center "DVD" path to point at the Videos folder. My wife was genuinely impressed to see all the random DVDs we've collected show up on Media center.
I've also changed the kitchen laptop to never suspend. Instead, the screen saver displays random photos from the "Photos" folder on the WHS box. It's a great way to be reminded of past memories without having to manually browse your photo collection. It's also an easy way to make sure your server is still kicking. :-)
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I'm in troubleshooting mode now. The last two mornings I've woken up to a frozen server machine. No blue screen. Just the screen contents from whenever it froze some number of hours ago.
I've checked all the event logs and don't see any suspicious activity any time near the freeze. I also had the foresight to leave both Task Manager, PerfMon and the WHS servers running and visible. Nothing out of the ordinary there either.
In both cases a backup from my Vista box was in progress. However, this morning (after rebooting) I initiated a manual backup which just completed successfully.
I do have some processor/motherboard monitoring software running. I'll try pulling that first to see if that helps.
To test out the I/O throughput, I copied ~100GB of video from my Vista box to the WHS machine. Sustained throughput was around 22 MB/second. Both machines have GB LAN cards and SATA II disks. Watching the network throughput in Task Manager, the data transfer was bursty in roughly minute intervals, alternating between moments of 50% net utilization and 15% utilization.
Subsequently, watching the throughput during backup, the net card saw a more more consistent 25% utilization, and about 28 MB/sec to the disk.
As for new observations on the WHS software, I've noticed the Start menu contents are substantially trimmed down, relative to a regular Windows 2003 install. I had a need for one of the items (Control Panel) and it was easy to reenable it in the Start menu Properties page.
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Last night was exciting as we got another build of WHS to play with. Since I had no data on the box from the previous version, I just did a "blow everything away" install. Nothing exciting to report in this regard, other than it rebooted many times along the way. After the OS installed, it took awhile longer to download/install the motherboard/ethernet/video/cool'n'quiet drivers.
On a very cool note, Lorenzo pointed out (via a comment) that using the "Portable/Laptop" power scheme is one way to let the AMD cool'n'quiet system do its magic. I'd been going nuts looking for a "Minimal Power Management" scheme, which is what most doc on the web says to use, but which wasn't an option on my box. Once set to Portable/Laptop power mode, I could see that the CPU speed was indeed adjusting to the load.
The client software install on both XP and Vista machines was very simple. Just drop the CD in, type in the server admin password prompted, and you're off to the races. The end result is an icon in the notification tray area. From right clicking on it, I could get to the shared folders, connect to the server console, and initiate a backup. The server console viewed on a client machine looks exactly like the console on the server.
To try out the file throughput, I copied my photos (27+ GB) from my desktop to the shared folder. Watching CPU usage on the server box, I could see a small load ( < 20%) from the process that migrates files to the duplicated storage volumes. As an experiment to see if I could make the file transfer any faster, I temporarily disabled my real-time antivirus scanner. Almost immediately, the server console "Network Health" status changed to "Critical". Clicking on the icon brought up a window that identifed exactly the issue (e.g., no antivirus software on machine 'X'). Pretty cool!
As I was playing with all this, I saw a little balloon pop up telling me that an automatic backup was about to begin. At this point, it was getting way past my bedtime so I left the machine to do its thing.
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Maybe it's just because my new box is setting next to me on the desk, but it's pretty loud. I suspect it's all the case fans. I would just pull the plug on some of the fans, but the temperature on the box slowly creeps up over time.
Based on data from the AMD CPU app, my current theory is that the CPU is running at full power all the time, despite having installed the Cool'n'Quiet driver. A little digging revealed that I need to set my power profile to "Minimal Power Management". Unfortunately, that one setting isn't showing up in my profile list. I'm going to let this slide until I install the next build of the OS.
Anyhow... Last night's task was to install the two 500GB drives. Only after getting them mounted did I realized I'd forgotten to pull the jumper which enables 3GB SATA 2 mode. With that fixed, the remaining task was to snake all the appropriate power and SATA cables to the right location. External USB storage would be a lot simpler, but doesn't have the same tech geek factor. :-)
The system booted normally. In the server console app, the two new drives appeared. I simply gave the OK to use them, and seconds later it was done. 1.06 TB of storage!
Next steps: Installing the client software on the other machines in my house.
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