My WHS Conversion Experience

[KarylFStein]

My SageTV server has been running very solid for a year, so I figured it was time to tinker with it. My last big change there was to move it from XP to Vista. Yes, it was running solid on XP, but for some reason I can’t help messing with things that are working. With the hype around Windows 7, the upgrade itch was getting unbearable. At the same time, the idea of trying Windows Home Server had been gnawing at me. As it turns out, I did both; I upgraded my server to WHS, and my personal desktop to 7, (it had been running XP fine for ages, so obviously I had switch things up with that too).

For some background, I used to run Linux servers with my only Windows server being for SageTV. I know that there’s a Linux version of SageTV—I started my whole HTPC experience with MythTV on Linux as I’ve been using Linux since ’93—but frankly have found that using Windows is a time saver for many things home-oriented. A couple years back, I decided that I wanted to have just one beefy server in the basement instead of the six or so low-powered ones I had. My first instinct was to run a VM or two because in the web and email world, I’m much more comfortable with LAMP, SAMBA, and Postfix. But I decided that I’d step out of my comfort zone and see what I could do totally in Windows.

So, I learned my way around IIS, installed Windows versions of PHP and PERL, found a gem in hMailServer, and installed SquirrelMail. This took care of most of my Linux needs: web server with PHP, email + webmail, and network drives. To replace my SSL VPN and dual-Internet connections, I bought a Netgear appliance. I could have done SSL VPN in software on Windows, but I think the multiple Internet connections would have been more difficult. I didn’t research that much, though, because the Netgear router just did it all brainlessly, (and I found a great deal for it on eBay). I ditched split-DNS and centralized LDAP authentication—they were slick, but unnecessary, (especially LDAP with the move away from Linux and the fact that I can do RDCs internally with WINS names and external access with DynDNS and IIS redirects so things like http://myhomeserver.com/tv hits IIS internally then redirects to https://myhomeserver:8443/sage/Home).

For availability on the server, I created three RAID-1 configurations: one for the OS, one for TV recordings, and one for all other data. I did this instead of something like RAID-5 because I felt it offered the best performance (ICH8R chipset—no separate RAID card for simplicity) and flexibility, (e.g. to increase TV recording space I just had to replace two drives). This worked awesomely; at least two of my drives failed over the past year, but there was no outage and to fix it—all I had to do is slide a new drive in the hot-swap bay to get things back to full redundancy. I installed Acronis TrueImage Home on all my family’s desktops and set them to do daily backups to the server and keep seven images around. This has also saved a lot of heartache a few times as reinstalling a good image after I really screwed something up took maybe an hour. (Did I mention that I have a nasty habit of tinkering with perfectly good/working things?) I also installed a removable drive tray and used GoodSync to copy changes to it nightly. Once a week I swapped the tray out using HotSwap! and stored it off-site. This was so if my house ever burned down or was otherwise destroyed, I’d still have most of my data somewhere else.

So, can WHS provide the same functionality? In a word, yes. It has some quirks, but I’ve been really impressed.

Availability: I put the OS disk (C and D) on a RAID-1 array. I had to create an F6 boot floppy to do this, but that worked fine, (I have one of those 3.5” memory card + floppy drive devices in the server). Why? Because although there’s data duplication for the “pool” and you can lose a drive there with no issue, the C and D drives have no such protection. Plus, the fact that you can’t backup the WHS C and D drives natively within WHS is terrible; that’s my one big complaint.

Redundancy: All my “pooled” shares have file duplication turned on, (even recorded TV, but no stutters). I bought a large HDD to replace two of the existing drives, so when it’s time to upgrade one of the smaller drives, I have a free bay and don’t have to worry about removing a drive and not having enough space on the others to redistribute the data. (In other words, insert the new drive, add it to the pool, remove the old drive from the pool, let things settle, remove the old drive, wipe and try to sell on eBay, and repeat when necessary.)

Backups: The WHS connector software was painless to install on the desktops, and is backing them up nightly. I tested a file and a “bare-metal” restore on one desktop and it worked as advertised. I still have my removable drive cage, and added my removable two disks as “backup” drives. I also still use GoodSync to store the WHS C drive to the pool, and use the WHSBDBB add-in to backup the D drive to the pool. The pool then gets stored on the removable drive and encrypted with TrueCrypt, (Acronis used to encrypt the desktop images, and I didn’t really care about encrypting pictures/video, but that’s done now too).

SageTV: No problems at all. I installed the WHS version, went through the configuration as usual except following the instructions for 64k clusters on WHS from S_M_E, installed plug-ins, moved over my wiz.bin, copied my video and recordings to the pool, (they were converted automatically to my new Recorded TV share—well done SageTV), set up Jetty with my old SSL key files, installed DirMon and ShowAnalyzer for commercial skip, installed clients, etc. Everything is back to normal in record time. Unfortunately, I had to replace some capacitors on an HD100—for some reason they died when I turned the extender off during the upgrades—but thankfully there was a forum post about that to make it easy.

Email: hMailServer has a backup/restore function that worked flawlessly. The only thing I did is change the storage location to the pool so as not to fill up the C drive, (20G seems pretty small although I’ve read that you can increase that). After installing ActivePerl and copying over my configuration file, SquirrelMail for webmail worked fine.

All-in-all, I’m pleasantly surprised by the WHS conversion. The actual changeover took around eight hours total, but most of that was installing the base OS, hitting Microsoft Update multiple times when I got around to it, (why do they only sell WHS SP1??), restoring TV/Video/Other Files from a backup over the network, configuring users, (there’s only three of us), and installing the MS connector software on the desktops. I think the total time actually doing something besides looking at progress bars was about two hours.

If I’m honest, the benefits of moving from my old set-up are frankly not great. I did get rid of Acronis, (I think they have a good product, but that does save money on those upgrades which I can’t seem to resist), and my unscientific feeling is that things are snappier with the new server over the network, (although that may be in part to my new Win7 desktop install). My previous server was running Vista Business, so RDC is not new. I was hoping for CableCard support, but that requires Windows 7. But for now, I’m doing just fine with “Basic” non-digital cable and unencrypted QAM for HD on the main networks. (I’ll think about CableCard next year when the upgrade itch strikes again.)

With all that said, I think WHS is a great platform for SageTV and a home network. If you haven’t tinkered as much as I have with backups, redundancy, etc. then there are even more reasons to check it out. Yes, the UI looks ugly if you RDC into it, but it seems to be a solid product and SageTV integrates into it flawlessly. Drivers for everything I use, (two Hauppauge 1800s, the MB features, and an extra SATA card for the removable drive), were available even for my “obsolete” DG965WH MB and Q6600 CPU.

[davephan]

The main, and critical downside to WHS is the inability to recover the WHS system drive. Have you been able to recover the WHS system drive without having to manually re-install everything - OS, programs, thousands of configuration changes, etc?

I don't think the drive copying program can copy the locked files on the C drive.

If you pulled the C partition and D partition which is on the same physical drive, and replaced it with a blank drive, how would you recover without having to manually install everything?

If you were using another operating system, like XP, Vista, Windows 7, etc, you could easily recover with an image. However, from my understanding of WHS, the WHS cannot be recovered with an image.

WHS is an attractive operating system which is flexible about adding drives and backing up other systems. However, WHS cannot backup and recover itself, which is a serious and critical flaw.

Dave

[Peter_h]

Yes, that is true.

However, if you build your own home server you can get pretty close to a base config using the OEM preinstall kit.

Basically, it has tools to create a "restore cd". However, you can not continue to update or make new images. Once you have registered the machine, your stuck with that image.

I just went through the process of building a restore image using the kit and then restoring to it to make sure it worked. It's definately not for the faint of heart but it did work and it's good to know that if for whatever reason the OS fails me again, i can restore to a base image with all drivers and sage running up to the date i created the image.

-Peter

[KarylFStein]

Right, if both system drives fail, then a reinstall of the OS, add-ons, user accounts, and extra software, (e.g. hMailServer, DirMon2, ShowAnalyzer), is necessary. The restore CD will automatically get your pool back, but there's going to be some manual work if/when I reinstall the OS. The reason I dump parts of C are to have backups of various configuration / state files. With Acronis on the previous set-up, I could boot from a CD, reinstall an image and have everything back the way it was automatically. Also, the "try it first" feature let me test changes, plugins, etc. and easily roll them back if needed. That's definitely a drawback to WHS and hopefully something they'll address in the next version. The "try it first" feature will especially be missed...

[davephan]

Have you tried imaging the WHS C and D partition drive with PING, Partition Image is Not Ghost (free imaging software), and later tried recovering the drive with the image? PING creates the image with the operating system down and restores with the operating system down. I'm curious what happens after the recovery.

If you run WHS between the image and recovery, so files are deleted and added, what happens after the recovery to a past point in time? Does the system boot? Is there a lot of corruption so the system is flaky or unusable? Or are the changed files orphaned?

Dave

[sic0048]

I'd say it would make the system unstable and unpredicable. It's not just the files you add or delete. The system will also balance the drives regularly and move files around. So if you take an image of the OS, it is pretty much useless soon after the image is made. That is why no solution exists at this time.