Windows Home Server For Dummies

Woody Leonhard

• Publisher: For Dummies
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781118052099
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Operating Systems
• Index: Computer Science

If you work in an office, you probably don't lose much sleep worrying about whether your files are safe if your PC melts down. Company IT departments handle those things for business networks. But how about all those precious photos, address lists, the family genealogy, and everything else that lives on your home network? Windows Home Server can save the day if one of your personal PCs hiccups, and Windows Home Server For Dummies serves up all the stuff you need to know to put it to work.

Forget everything you've heard about previous versions of Windows Server; this all-new variation has been designed for people who don't wear white lab coats or pocket protectors. Woody Leonhard has tested it and it passed with flying colors. If you have a home or small business network, this book shows you how Windows Home Server helps you

• Share files among all the PCs in your home
• Access your files from anywhere
• Make regular backups automatically
• Store files securely
• Play music, TV shows, or movies on your Xbox
• Share multimedia across your network
• Keep your virus protection and system upgrades up to date
• Get regular reports on the overall health of your network

Windows Home Server For Dummies provides sage advice on choosing a version of Windows Home Server, installing it, setting up users and passwords, using remote access, scheduling automatic scans and backups, and having fun with multimedia. Trust Woody— you'll sleep better.

Part I

Getting Windows Home Server to Serve

In this part . . .

Windows Home Server makes a great slave, but a horrible master.

As long as you stick to the prescribed installation procedure — described here in loving detail — your Windows Home Server box will purr like a kitten, and you’ll never have to deal with the Byzantine underbelly of the beast. At least, WHS’s sharp fangs won’t appear until you try to do something strange, like set up an old printer. Follow the rules here and you only see the Dr. Jekyll persona of the server; with a little luck, you’ll never even know that Mr. Hyde hides deep inside.

This part of Windows Home Server For Dummies takes you on a guided tour of Windows Home Server, its features and foibles, and then escorts you through choosing and installing the WHS box itself. If you bought WHS as a shrink-wrapped, standalone product (as opposed to buying it preinstalled on a new PC), this part also shows you how to get WHS installed on the PC of your choice.

Chapter 1

Bringing Windows Home Server to Life

In This Chapter

Making great things happen with Windows Home Server

Dealing with WHS’s limitations

Controlling Windows Home Server with a “headless horseman” console

Choosing a fabulous Windows Home Server — cheap

Sticking the Home Server box in your home or small office

Installing the shrink-wrapped version of Windows Home server

As a first approximation, you should think of your Windows Home Server as a washing machine.

Okay, okay. It’s a washing machine with a LAN cable and a gaggle of hard drives. Picky, picky. I’m pushing the analogy a bit. But in many ways, your Windows Home Server box just sits there. No keyboard to soak up spilled coffee. No mouse accumulating gunk on its slick little feet. No 27-inch widescreen LCD monitor with Dolby 7.1 surround sound and an independently powered subwoofer that pushes more air than a Lear Jet.

Naw, it just sits there.

Once you get the hang of it, and customize the software in a couple of ways, your Windows Home Server sort of fades into the background. Then you needn’t lift a finger. You can completely forget about it. Until the day the hard drive on one of your PC dies, or you discover that one bit in your magnum opus flipped and Word can’t read it anymore, or you’re vacationing on Mt. Denali and the boss calls to say she needs that report you left back at the house right now, or the kids invite a friendly little rootkit to take up residence on the family computer.

That’s when you’ll thank your lucky stars that Windows Home Server’s sittin’ in the background doin’ its thing.

I can’t recall any Microsoft product (except for Notepad, maybe) that works so well, so easily, with so little fuss, right out of the box. If you have two or more computers networked together — doesn’t matter if you only use them to send email and surf the Web, or print cross-stitch patterns and play Gears of War — some day, in some way, Windows Home Server will save your bacon.

What Can You Do with Windows Home Server?

For a little box that just sits there, Windows Home Server covers some very important bases. But it doesn’t try to cover all the bases. That’s part of the genius of Windows Home Server: Its designers didn’t try to solve every problem, didn’t cater to every wish list, didn’t let the ugly Windows Server 2003 genie — the guy inside WHS with Robin Williams’s voice and Hannibal Lecter’s soul — out of the bottle.

From my point of view, Windows Home Server does just six things — and each one rates its own section . . .

Backing up and restoring

At the top of the feature heap, Windows Home Server backs up all the data on all your computers (see Figure 1-1). Automatically. No setup wizards, other than a very simple hook-up program. No weird jargon.

Figure 1-1: Windows Home Server backups are a breeze.

Here’s what you can expect if you use WHS as your backup central:

If you need to retrieve an old copy of a file, WHS makes it easy. I talk about the ins and outs in Part V.

WHS Backup lets you restore an entire hard drive. This ain’t your father’s backup program: if one of the PCs on your network suddenly loses its C: drive — or you get clobbered by a virus, or a rogue Windows automatic update freezes your Windows XP machine tighter than a penguin’s tail feathers — WHS’s computer restore feature (Chapter 13) lets you bring back an earlier version of the entire hard drive with very little fuss.

If you shell out the shekels and put two or more hard drives in your WHS computer, Windows Home Server mirrors backup data: Separate, individually recoverable copies of the backup reside on more than one hard drive. That way, if one of the WHS computer’s hard drives fail, you can resurrect everything. Try doing that with your one-button-backup hard drive.

The backup program itself packs lots of smarts. For example, if you have the same file on two different drives, or even on two different computers, WHS only maintains one backup. In fact, if pieces of files are duplicated across multiple machines, only one copy of each piece — each Lego block, if you will — gets stored. WHS maintains a table that keeps track of which piece goes where on what machine.

Very slick.

Sharing folde...

Table of contents

• Title
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part I : Getting Windows Home Server to Serve
• Part II : Setting Up the Network
• Part III : Making the Most of Multimedia
• Part IV : Sharing in the Wild
• Part V : Backing Up
• Part VI : Staying Alive and Well
• Part VII : The Part of Tens
• : Further Reading