Windows Home Server and HP Mediasmart Home Server
My Windows Home Server (WHS) box was thrown together out of spare parts I had taking up space in my closet. When I first started playing with WHS it was in open beta. There was a few problems that I contributed to the beta build and when it was out of beta I thought the problems were related to my crazy box, did I mention that the BIOS on the mobo is wrong? I don’t mean outdated I mean not for this mobo type stuff. Surprised it even works. The chipset works but it is identified as something totally different than what it is. What do you expect, it was free people. So I had an extremely long boot time like 8 minutes and for some reason the connector software could see the WHS box but would not connect to it. The boot time problem, I wasn’t really worried about because once it is up and running you don’t shut it down. The connection software problem was a mystery but wasn’t hard to get past, I just mapped the shared folder on the WHS, no problem. So it has sat on my rack in the laundry room for some time now, just running like a good little server should, not bad for free. Now however, I have out grown my old WHS, all the drive bays are full and I have two external USB hard drives
connected to it as well, time for an upgrade. I decided to replace it with an HP Mediasmart Home Server, as of late, it has been mocking me on Amazon and I just had to have it. The model I got HP EX470 comes with a 500GB hard drive. I also bought a 1TB hard drive to get me started. Here is an interesting thing about this server I did not realize when I bought it, it's not even a foot tall! I would compare the over all size to the drobo. I was a little nervous about it not having a VGA port for a monitor and kind of felt that sting for about 2 hours while trying to set it up. Remember that problem with the connector software? It’s back with the new HP WHS. They do provide you with some tools that scans your network and tries to point you in the right direction of the problem but in my case it just ran me in circles about my DDNS and my network router which is a PC with IPcop installed. After making several changes to my IPcop settings with no luck at all of fixing this connection problem. I stepped back and come to the conclusion that the problem was not IPcop. Well, not being 100% sure about that, I decided to take IPcop out of the loop and try connecting through a Linksys router I use as my wireless network in my home. I tried connecting to the HP WHS and it would see the server but would not connect to it, same problem. So realizing the problem was not my network it had to be something else. The answer was to manually add the server’s IP address and host name to the HOST file in all the client PCs, which is in the C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc directory. Another interest point to keep in mind is if you’re doing this on a Vista PC you have to go into Safe Mode to edit the file.
After all the dirty work was done and my network was back to the way it was originally, everything worked wonderfully. Even after all the power cycling of the HP box it still sat at the setup screen waiting for me to enter in my configuration preferences. I’ve got to add HP has included some add-on software to the WHS that really helps guide you through the process of fine tuning your WHS and setting up the extra features that usually get over looked. Over all I am very pleased with HP. That's saying a lot because I am a Dell man.
