Technology Strategists, Inc.

Windows Home Server is an interesting beast. We have been running it here for the last year or so and found it to be quite reliable for desktop/laptop backups. It is also used to serve media, but that has been more ‘interesting’. WHS does backups in an ingenious way — the client machine is woke in the wee hours and a backup run of the changed blocks. This is much faster and moves less data and uses the replication services in the OS. On the server the backup streams are de-duplicated so there is one copy of the XP kernel and so forth. Means that the backup space is a fraction of the sum of all the disks rather than a multiple. So far, I have had to restore two hard drives from these backups — the restores were fast and flawless on different disks — a good test in my book.

Media services have been interesting. Music seems to go ok but I find that playing music in order seems to be a challenge. Using a playlist or building one by tagging individual files it still gets played out of order. Cute but annoying. Depressingly, if I want to hear an opera complete I am still better off to push in a CD or an LP.

Video has been fascinating in that neither the media connector nor the fileshare wants to expose filetypes other than the aging types that windows has supported for many years. Doesn’t matter if media player can decode them, if its not avi (almost obsolete) or MP4/Quicktime then it doesn’t exist. So I copy all the files to another NAS device and play them from it. And yes, I have heard all the arguments about streaming file types and what windows can support … its streaming all right.

What I don’t understand is why it works so poorly with Windows 7×64. Oh, backups will run (if I leave the machine on) but the automagic restart has never worked. The vendor argument is that it is my hardware, but I have an add-on to WHS (Autoexit) that can start and stop my W7 box flawlessly. But when I leave it to WHS the client device ends up wedged and must be manually crashed & rebooted to do anything. I guess its a feature.

I have liked W7 since I installed it over Vista. But in truth, they are both pretty good (if the horsepower and memory is adequate). But the one thing I do not understand is why it is such a slug in working with the local network. If I open my Network Neighborhood on XP I can browse the LAN fairly quickly. But with W7 (and Vista before it) there was a very long pause before any other hosts would appear. And once the host appears there is another long delay before I can get access to the contents of a share. It is sometimes faster to walk over to the other machine, sign on and access the file I want than wait for W7 to do its thing.

And the other thing I don’t understand is how W7 makes its mind up as to whether my network connection has internet access or not? Is it one of these things where if it cannot see some server at Microsoft then of course the whole internet is down? When I first started to see ‘no internet access’ I worried, but after repeatedly been able to get to my favorite websites I realized this was just another mis-feature. Such a waste, if the software cannot tell me something useful then it should just stay quiet.

So in the end, I have decided that I like both Windows 7 and Windows Home Server. But as always there are these ‘character flaws’ that make me scratch my head. But I am glad that WHS exists — it is the only reasonable solution I have found for backing up a bunch of user machines reliably and economically with relatively little complaining.

As I write this I am watching WHS restore one of our laptops from backup. We have a Microsoft Small Business Server network here and a small number of laptops and desktops. Over the years we have tried various solutions to backing up the user devices — from local scripts to Data Protection Manager. Nothing has worked really well and all required manual effort to keep protection current.

But not Windows Home Server — this installs a client on the user machine and wakes it up overnight to do a backup. And incredibly it just copies the changed pages from disk, not another copy of the whole machine. Even more unbelievably it recognizes that there are a lot of common OS and application files in any collection of machines and stores one copy — with a list of who all had them. So the amount of space required to save the backups is very much smaller than the sum of the disk space for all the machines.

We run WHS on an old workstation with some internal and external disks. There are some nice commercial packages from HP, Acer and others that provide a pre-configured installation. That would be ideal for a small business — just need to ensure that there is enough internal storage. WHS has its own workgroup and will not join the domain. I am sure that Microsoft had a good reason for doing this, but it does seem a bit lame. So all of our user devices are members of the domain and the workgroup. This does have the occasional strange side effect, mostly with network shares, but in general we just ignore it.

It is a pity that it wont join the SBS server — we back that up nightly with a script that does Exchange and all our SQLserver databases. This works good enough. We had tried DPM but were dissappointed at how neurotic it was, always claiming there was some problem deep in the bowels someplace. Never anything we could do anything about — reminded me of an old girlfriend who was always trying to attract attention by complaining endlessly about imaginary ills. In the end, both the old girlfriend and DPM are distant memories — a pity, but good riddance.

So far we have done the ultimate test of a backup system — twice. We replaced the hard drive on two of our laptops and recovered them from WHS. The laptop with a CD drive was pretty painless. One just booted from the recovery CD after the hard disk-ectomy. The CD booted a small verison of windows into memory, let me reformat the new drive, then run a full restore. The old files came back just as they were pulled, fragmented like anything. So a full defrag and we are done. Really painless and only took a few hours to transfer everything across the ethernet (100mb/sec).

Well, it passes my test for good technology — just does its job and doesn’t complain unnecessarily. There is damn little of this kind of stuff around. Good job, Microsoft.

Are you like us, with a collection of XP workstations and Windows servers protected by Trend Micro Client-Server Messaging? Thinking about upgrading to the current version of CSM called (ironically) Worry Free Business Security? If our experience is any indication, better start worrying now.

We have used Trend for years to protect our servers and workstations. It has always seemed to do a good job without being unreasonably disruptive. We have recommended it to many other small businesses. Untill now this has been a good solution.

CSM 3.6 worked well on Vista. But when time came to upgrade this machine to Windows 7, the Microsoft Upgrade adviser told us (wrongly) that we needed to remove the client software and could reinstall it afterwards. Being a trusting soul (or idiot) I believed them. But it would not reinstall on the Windows 7 upgrade — a programatic check in the installer blocked it from running. Now what…

After much digging, and reading past press releases from months ago trumpeting support, we found that only the latest version of ‘Worry Free Business Security’ would be supporting Windows 7. But not yet, shortly before full W7 product release they were only supporting the beta. Then there was a service pack update and we could upgrade and install the client on Windows 7.

The upgrade on our Small Business Server seemed to go ok but after completion it had problems. In the end we had to remove it and reinstall (again). Now at least we had a working security server. And the upgrade would transparently upgrade the clients — this seemed to work as well.

But on the Windows 7 machine, things were not well. Stuff that worked under Vista is now breaking. After much angst it turned out that the new Trend client was blocking these programs — so we needed to put both the programs and directories into (separate) exclusion lists to continue. The interesting feature is that this did not happen with XP, only Windows 7 got the new and improved disruptions.

Like other businesses, we have a bunch of small virtual machines that run older applications that we still rely on — like our accounting programs and specialized network access tools. These had been hosted on the Vista workstation that was upgraded to Windows 7. Oh, the virtual machines continued to run fine at first. But when Trend was deployed this all crashed. Trend blocked all network access to the virtual machines and none of the exclusionary fiddling would bring it back. A response from Trend support revealed that only server virtualization was now ‘compatible’ with the client — and this required a registry hack to enable a needed feature. No mention of this in the release notes, of course or the administration docs. And both the client and security console are silent about things that they block — nothing in the logs either.

So for now, Trend has been removed from the Windows 7 machine. And of course, the virtual machines are now working. Whether Trend will fix this or not remains to be seen. But we are pretty annoyed at having to learn this the hard way. It seems to work fine on our Windows 2003/Exchange servers and the existing XP machines. But On Windows 7 it is a very different animal. Looks like it may be time to reconsider how we approach things.

Since moving from Toronto to Amherst Island, life has become much quieter. We provide a bit of local computer support to the area and keep in touch with old friends and clients, but the economic slowdown and the realities of rural life mean that the frantic existence supporting the Toronto financial community is at an end. So we are involved with other technology projects to make our lives better.

Cutting down on clutter and making things more accessible has lead into implementing a digital media server for music and video — this allowed us to pack up a lot of our CDs and other media. Windows Home Server hosts this material and provides backup services for our laptops and other devices — even those on the domain. Have setup a virtual machine to explore Windows 7 — hosted on Vista x64 together with XP. Running virtual, W7 seems more responsive than XP or the early release of Vista. The issue will be application compatibility. Am using Unity mode on VMWare, so already accessing XP application screens directly from Vista. Looks like they intercept the window manager calls in the VM and push it out to the host — there is a small performance price, of course, but usability is pretty good.

Being in a rural area, internet service is interesting. We use a combination of satellite and wireless (due to sunk costs) but failover between the two providers is tricky. And as with all broadcasts, when the weather goes bad so does the connection. So one trades off the long latency of the satellite for the intermittent high speed of the wireless link. So far the satellite is more reliable, the wireless is prone to DNS dropouts and wildly varying throughput. And VOIP is hopeless most of the time — so there is still a copper cable to Bell.

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