... again.

save your money and test AND LEARN with linux, and get a thank you and a useful skill at the end.

.. rather than a half arsed product that you are not going to be able to use commercially or domestically (it seems).

Just use Red Had Linux and Amahi - all free, available now and less sucky than Windows.

I am always amazed at how much trolling freetards do. The Windows Home Server product is actually quite good. I tried the linux route and found that it was not easy nor simple to set up a file share my wife could use easily. Configuring open VPN was a nightmare and never worked as advertised for me. And full backup of a machine wasn't a simple set and forget.

With the Windows Home Server, I get file level, cross drive duplication for redundancy, nightly backup of Windows and Mac machines, a full blown VPN (with Hamachi), a web facing login if I so desire, RDP to any machine in my network and folders that can span multiple drives. The OS may not have taken off huge, but there is a lot to recommend it and it is quite well thought out. And there are a number of people who have put together modifications for just about everything from serving up forums to using it as an exchange server.

As a NAS, the HP boxes have some of the best LAN performance around. (Check out smallnetbuilder for some speed comparisons).

I'll get my asbestos coat now, as I am sure I will be roasted for not knowing how to compile my own kernel from scratch then building an enterprise class server all by my lonesome. Don't get me wrong, I use Ubuntu on and off, I am enjoying Moblin at the moment, have played with everything from Red Hat to Fedora, etc. But as a set it and forget it box, the WHS rocks!

i on the other hand have found it most handly.

- running squeezeserver to feed its stored MP3's around the house to

suitably equiped rooms,

- being a network store for my media centre's recorded TV,

- automagically managing my disks with online invisable data mirroring across drives, dependent on what i want to mirror.

- able to wake up, then wake up other machines on the network, back them up, put them back to sleep again, and goto sleep.

- has a preconfigured service to provide a website to the outside world for your users to access files on the homeserver, and connection permitting, to remote desktop over the web onto it's console and or other connected machines on its network.

- being a NAS device that can actually get 40+MB/s over gigabit network....

i could carry on. but i actually like to spend my time using the resources and devices i have at my disposal, rather than balls deep in kernal code trying to get the thing to give me a display or even basic network capabilities. never mind automated systems management.

so excuse me if i pass by the option of the black and white beaked one, to do all that homeserver provides.

Typical freetard comments were expected on this one...

@jeremey 3 11:46

@Bilgepipe 12:04

That was so fanboi that it isn't even worth reading... total nonsense.

I looked at Amahi, and like almost everything else Linux, it's 80% done and too many hassles for non-techies to bother with. Plus Amahi has the typical freetard attitude on their web site which does nothing but turn many people off.

@Daniel 1 13:08

I don't feel there is anything wrong with the name. I have Home Server on my home network strictly for a file server (much of the WHS toys are off or bypassed). I have also recommended WHS to other SOHOs.

Oh, just buy him an ice cream and he'll be happy. For a while.

"No email server = fail"

Even simpler than saying it fails would be to just install an email server, no?

SmarterMail: top-quality mail server, excellent Windows Server and WHS integration, no-cost (free) for 10 mailbox on single domain. Includes language packs, dictionaries, anti-spam, anti-virus, a very good webmail interface, etc. etc.

I have been using it myself for over a year and really like it.

http://www.smartertools.com/

Um, it's a server, but cannot run software RAID 5, and only a propriety version of RAID 1. Tries to kill any USB harddrive you plug into it. And has no head (monitor) support.

If they gave it Expandable Software RAID 5, and told the hardware companies to give it an HDMI output from an ION based video card, threw on a nice media player App on it. I would buy one and use it as server, and an always ready media player, until then, I'll just laugh whenever one of my friends complain about theirs.

Do the math: 1tb+1tb+1tb+tb=(2tb)=RAID1, or, 1tb+1tb+1tb+tb=(3tb)=RAID5

"Well, what's it doing? I don't know, I can't remote into it. And if I turn it off, it might lose some of my stuff."

If you want a monitor on a WHS - then you can have one. Its only Sever 2003 with some mods, for gods sake.

WHS Treats my USB drives just fine, thanks for asking.

WHS doesn`t officially support any type of RAID set, although some run raid 1 on the system drive. Drive Extender tries to solve a different problem in a different way. You can`t really compare.

And if you want to run applications on it, then you`ve quite mad.

Its not rocket science mate.

And for the record, my whs has never locked up in 18 months. Only time it breaks is when I break it ;-)

People who moan about WHS generally either don`t understand what it is, or are just trolling.

Download the OpenFiler distro from www.openfiler.com, or the FreeNAS build from www.freenas.org. Again, an easy web based setup on your choice of hardware. There's really no excuse for complaining that Linux or FreeBSD home storage is hard to set up.

Jeremy.