New toys and items

That I am playing with

WHS 2011

 

 

 

 

I just got this set up at my new place.  I had a WHS 2005 and really liked it, it had saved my butt several times when a computer had crashed or a hard drive failed. So with a new home to set up I thought that I would take my old server box and throw some new life into her since it was a dual core 64 bit machine.

 

 I went out and purchased 2 x 2TB drives, and a matched set of 2 X 4 GB Ram for her. The first bit a trouble came when I realized that the old server board did not have a Hardware raid built into it. With the new WHS there is no driver extender so I sat down and started figuring what to do. Years ago we all used MS software raid built into the OS and I thought, that maybe I could just use that again, always worked good on those ole Windows 2000 servers I set up.

 

So, loaded up the OS on one drive ( 3 partitions for WHS) 1. boot, 2, OS for WHS and 3. data storage. No problems until I came to the 3rd partition, it just did not want to raid, there was no option to Raid. So this frustrated me and I started searching Google looking for a answer. Way off at an obscure website blog someone had ran into the same issue and fixed it with a simple tweak.

 

For some reason when trying to Raid multiple ( more than 2) partitions in a software raid on Server 2008R2 it needs to have 1 sector open on the Hard drive to accomplish this. This is insane, really? So I shrank the first 100MB partition down to 82 MB which was the smallest it would go and sure enough after a reboot the third partition was available to be raided.

 

Looking at the disk manager kind of sucks because of the open space in there in different places, but I have booted to both drives and it works fine in Raiding so I  am good with that ugliness.

 

The rest of the install, client connections and setup was a breeze. I set up 2 shared printers off of it and eventually I will get around to doing other things, but right now for 89 dollars (at Amazon.com) for this, I am very satisfied and I have not even started with add-ons, internet sharing and the such yet. I will play when the cold weather and time allows and keep this post updated.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

After being told that my new home (with a already installed Brinks) security  system was going to cost me a fortune a month to live with, I looked elsewhere. Going to try;

 

Lifesheild.com and see how it works, let you all know.