Which operating system for a home server

A

AMD_RULES

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I want to be able to do the following with my server:

1. Store/share files with home network
2. Backup two desktops and one laptop
3. Access files and the server itself from college or anywhere else away from home.

I can get Server 2008 for free through my college and I'm not sure if I want to bother with WHS.
 
windows home server does all that. Server 2008 isn't going to backup your other computers automatically for you so you can do bare metal restores.
 
AMD_RULES said:
I want to be able to do the following with my server:

1. Store/share files with home network
2. Backup two desktops and one laptop
3. Access files and the server itself from college or anywhere else away from home.

I can get Server 2008 for free through my college and I'm not sure if I want to bother with WHS.
Click to expand...

Add internet access to your files and PC's, The ability to stream your media over the web all at no extra charge and you've got WHS.

Server 2008 is a good, especially for free, but for ease of use, and features WHS can't be topped.
 
I take it you're comfortable with Windows and weren't wanting to delve into Linux/Solaris/BSD? :p
 
How does WHS add Internet access?

You could just use Server 2008 and download Live Mesh, sync files online, and access them through live.com. It's really only good for documents and music though. For streaming media, WMP 12 has a feature to link to your live account and stream music online. It's built into Windows 7 and can be almost fully enabled on Server 2008.
 
bigdogchris said:
How does WHS add Internet access?
Click to expand...

It creates a website you can log in to. Then you can download and upload to your server but you can also take remote control of any windows machines on your home network.

And there are several WHS addins that extended the functionality of this and can add additional streaming options.
 
bigdogchris said:
How does WHS add Internet access?

You could just use Server 2008 and download Live Mesh, sync files online, and access them through live.com. It's really only good for documents and music though. For streaming media, WMP 12 has a feature to link to your live account and stream music online. It's built into Windows 7 and can be almost fully enabled on Server 2008.
Click to expand...

WHS allows you to create a domain name that points to your WHS. You can use any domain though godaddy, or you can use a Homeserver.com address. Example yourservername.homeserver.com. It keeps this address up to date, so even those with dynamic ip addresses don't need to worry.

Once configured, WHS will use UPnP to port forward any traffic to that address to your WHS. Using the https://yourservername.homeserver.com address you create, you log into a web portal to your server. From there, you have complete access to your server files, access to any Windows machine that allows remote desktop access, customized links, as well as a Silverlite based media browser and player.

To accomplish the same thing on server 2008 that WHS does out of the box would require.
-Some expertise on managing IIS to create the web portal.
-Dynamic DNS software and a service to support it
-Purchasing an SSL certificate for secure HTTPS access
-3rd party software for web based file access, or the programming skills to create your own.
-3rd party media streaming software or a music streamng service like Amazon that syncs your collection to it.
-3rd party backup software for PC's on the network.
-3rd party monitoring software to keep track of security problems on network PCs.

It is possible to accomplish very similar features on server 2008 or linux, but would require a lot more effort, and a lot more hands on management. WHS does this all, out of the box. It is literally a "set it and forget it" type of system. Once installed and configured, you just use it.

The previous version of WHS allowed you to Download and install a trial version. The current doesn't but has a web page that simulates the product.
http://online.holsystems.com/portals/sbs/whs/

Check it out if you are curious.

edit:
I wanted to add. There is also a robust WHS community out there as well with tons of add-ins that really extend the functionality of the server. Check out http://wegotserved.com you can see a lot of the stuff around the WHS product.
 
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If you don't mind booting clients to a cd, clonezilla works great for me. I personally have it setup to use pxe and my nfs servers but it supports netbios and livecd's. Does automation to
 
Does it do data de-duplication or anything similar? Another advantage to WHS. I can restore the entire system from any night over the past year or just an individual file or folder without eating up massive disk space on my server. :)

This ability has saved me endless frustration after "playing around" with new software or dual boot scenario's that didn't go to plan.
 
No, but its really fast. I have a "prototype" of each machine and for instance it took 5 minutes to restore a image to my laptop quite literally, I think it was reporting 8 GB/minute. Its mostly limited by my gigabit
 
WHS is probably the easiest, but if you want something just as good, and free, there's Linux. Play with various distros and see which one you like best. You will need to script stuff yourself such as rsync backups, but all of it + much much more is doable.

My home Linux server does the following:

- File sharing
- PC backups
- VMs (wont get into what each one does... some are Windows, some are Linux)
- DNS
- Email/spam filtering
- Web (for dev/test environments, and my own tools)
- Misc stuff such as a bot that parses emails sent to a specific email account and posts news on one of my sites

Linux is so flexible, that's why I personally like it better than anything else. Though, if you are not familiar and you just want it to work with a few clicks then WHS is probably better for you.
 
Server2k8 can do all of that maybee excluding the backup your computers thing. If you mean do a full system image I dont think It can do that, but if you just need it to say just backup all files in c:\documents\username or other directories it has no problem doing that with a scheduled ntbackup.
I can say that setting up your shares and VPN compared to WHS won't be super easy, but it can be done as I do all of that now with Server2k8.
 
Don't be a pussy. Go with Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise like I did. :D

Server2008R2.gif
 
I'm not looking to do restore images when I refer to back ups, I just want to back up music, photos, and documents.
 
Personally, I use Windows 2011 SBS Standard with WHS in a VM for backups.

SBS Standard is essentially, Windows 2008 Server with all the remote capabilities of WHS minus the Media Streaming. It also has SQL, Sharepoint, Exchange Server, Hyper-V, etc.

The only things it doesn't do are the WHS data dedup style backups and media streaming. But, I installed WHS in a VM to handle the backup stuff, and I use Twonky server for media streaming.

I also use Asus Web Storage to backup all my data to the cloud. As it turns out, Asus just added a music streaming service to the WebStorage product. It automatically adds any MP3's I have backed up to a nice Web Based Music Streaming site.

Honestly, I love the power of hosting my own domain and exchange server. Exchange web mail is pretty awesome for when I am away, and since it's a full exchange server install, I get all the great benefits of syncronized unread marks, folders, contacts from any Outlook client or browswer via webmail.

The web based file sharing has become extremely helpful as well. My friends and I are Company of Heroes fans, and have a pretty large selection of Maps we play, but you can't easily find all the maps we use on the web, and none in one location, so we keep them all on my server to make sure everyone has easy access to them.

I did go a little overboard when I built my server though. Core i7 950 processor, 12 GB of RAM, Vertex 2 SSD for the OS, a 12TB RAID5 array. It has been a great platform for me and a great way to run test VM's.

But about WHS again, honestly, you may want to check it out, at least in a VM on a 2008 box. I think you will be really impressed with it. It's an amazing product.
 
Actually for backups, if you go windows 2008, enable shadow file copy. If there's one feature in Windows that Linux does not have, that would be great, it's that. I would not use that exclusively, as you can still loose it in a catastrophic file system failure, but I would use that as primary backup, and then do some kind of sync to an external storage.
 
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