It would appear that I haven’t been doing much on this blog lately, which is completely true of course! However I haven’t disappeared from the blog world entirely.

I have been writing various articles and working behind the scenes for www.mswhs.com – so why not pop over there and see what I have been writing, (about Windows home server machines mostly), and take a look at all the other blog entries there from the whole team.

From time to time I will still write stuff on here about other areas of interest, but for the moment that’s where my focus is! [ In my free time of course as I still have a day job to do!]

With the ever-increasing amounts of "stuff" that the average family has on their computers these days, it becomes ever more important to have a backup strategy of some kind. This "stuff" include your music, photos, videos and to an increasing degree scans of everyday documents.

More often than not there is no thought about backup at all, at least until the first time that the disk crashes and takes with it your photographs and music. If you are lucky, you may be able to recover it using some kind of disk recovery utility, or your friendly neighbour / family member who has an IT background. (I seem to do this task for at least 6 family members!).

However a much better way of approaching this is to have some kind of backup strategy, so that all of your data is safely saved elsewhere. With most people this amounts to occasionally backing up whatever is considered to be their precious data to an external hard disk. This depends on doing the backup itself on a timely basis, so that not too much data is lost. So this method would always work if you are reasonably organised. Generally speaking with everyone seeming to have busy lives these days, the reality of the situation is that whilst you might start off doing this regular basis, the timeliness of this task will fade away as time goes on. The value of the backup then has less value.

It’s all starting to sound like a bit of a nightmare isn’t it?!

However! Microsoft to the rescue! Enter stage right, Windows Home Server, (commonly known as WHS). This is basically a version of Windows Server 2003 R2 that has been modified to create a product for the home consumer. There are more details available from the Microsoft website at http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/windowshomeserver/default.mspx. The Windows home server machine will automatically backup all of the connected machines, and also provide a central storage location for photographs, music, videos and basically anything else you wish to store on it. But that is not the end of its capabilities, it can do so much more!

All digital media stored in a central location

Home computers backed up daily, automatically

Restore lost files or even entire hard drive contents

Complete access to files at home and from remote locations

Easily add storage space and new software capabilities

If you have more than one hard drive installed into your WHS machine, then you can set the machine so that the data is duplicated across multiple disks which in itself is a good safety measure.

It is also very clever from the point of view that ordinarily you would think that if you did multiple backups of one or more machines, all you would do, is succeed in filling up all of the storage available in your WHS. WRONG! WHS is so clever that it works at the cluster level… confused? Well don’t be, this basically means that the data is looked at on all machines and compared, and only one instance of that data is stored on the WHS machine. So if you had 3 machines backing up to the WHS machine and they all contain the same bit of music or the same photograph then only one instance of that particular bit of data will be stored. So instead of saving the same data 3 times it is just saved the once. The best example of this of course is that if all of those machines are running the same operating system, then only one instance of the operating system will be saved on the WHS machine.

This is one of the killer aspects of WHS, if for instance your system drive dies on your home PC, all you have to do is simply buy a new hard disk, put it in your machine, and then restore the backup from the previous night onto that hard disk and you can be up and running again within a few hours with minimal if any data loss. So in this instance you don’t have to re-install the operating system, all of the applications or any data -your whole system is just restored!

As you can tell I am a complete fan of WHS and I haven’t even mentioned the add-ins yet! Perhaps I’ll do that another day!

I’ll also quickly add that WHS has the capability of backing itself up to a removable hard disk, which you can then take off site for further safety. What I actually do is I have 2 separate 1 TB drives, (I have called them Ant and Dec…!), one of which is backed up to on a daily basis and the other is kept off site. The 2 disks are then swapped out on a weekly basis.

Am I sure that all my data is safe? Yes I’m pretty sure!

So I would recommend that anybody that has more than one machine in their home setup, or they have data that must absolutely be securely stored then they must get a WHS machine!

Here’s a few resources that would be of use to any prospective or existing WHS owner

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/windowshomeserver/default.mspx

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Home_Server

http://www.homeserverhacks.com/

http://mswhs.com/

http://usingwindowshomeserver.com/

http://www.wegotserved.com/

http://www.homeserverland.com/

http://social.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/category/windowshomeserver

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/resultsForProduct.aspx?displaylang=en&productID=2191C786-5371-4F57-8C1F-9E8F052AC847

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/windowshomeserver/eval.mspx – 120 day trial download

If you have any further links please let me know!

I hope this insight into WHS as an absolutely essential backup tool has been of use to you, and please feel free to comment or ask any questions!

My home network has evolved over time, so I thought I would draw it out just so that I had a visual representation of it.

Just to explain, we built an extension on the house and during the build process I made sure that pretty much every room had 2 cat 5 Ethernet ports in it, so that I had connectivity everywhere. Those rooms that don’t have Ethernet in will have wireless coverage.

Tucked away in the back of our dressing area is a Node 0 point where all the cables come back to – both Ethernet and TV. In this area I have a 24 port 100 mbps switch for all the lighter traffic. The machines that would benefit from speedier connections I have them connected in to a 5 port gigabit switch. This would be any machine that backs up to the Windows Home Server machine, or any device that serves media.

 

Next time I’ll tell you more about how I back up the data.

Best description of twitter I’ve seen – http://applicant.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/tweetcurrency1.jpg

 

Well here we are a long last at the start of the 2009 Formula One season. It’s nearly 5 months since the last race of the 2008 season where infamously Lewis Hamilton pulled it off on the last but one corner from home.

So it’s going to be more of the same this year isn’t it? Well it would appear not, if preseason testing is anything to base future predictions on, it would appear that McLaren aren’t going to do very well this year, and the team that was on the edge of shutting its doors, (namely Honda), has found its feet in incredible style under the new guise of Brawn GP. The pace of the Brawn car has been absolutely incredible in all of the preseason tests that it attended, (which probably was only about half of those that everyone else attended simply because of the doubt over its continued participation).

As of Friday morning, (27 March 2009), the first two practice sessions have happened and heading the table is… Williams…

So it would appear that this season is likely, at least for the first few races anyway, to be very topsy-turvy, not least because the teams that currently are producing the pace, Williams, Brawn GP and Toyota are all running diffusers that the rest of the teams have objected to. The FIA has already approved these diffusers, and so have the race stewards of the Australian Grand Prix, but the other teams have lodged an appeal that will be heard until after the Bahrain Grand Prix in a couple of weeks. Some would say this is just sour grapes on the part of the other teams, simply because they didn’t design their diffusers in the same manner as those three teams, and I guess this synopsis would be correct. However I must say I do like the quote I saw somewhere on the BBC when someone from the Toyota team was told “your diffuser isn’t in the spirit of F1” and they responded “The Spirit of F1 is the very clever beat the merely clever”. Absolute class!

So what is a diffuser? In essence it’s a big tray under the rear of a Formula One car that slopes upwards, and therefore accelerates the speed of air out from underneath the car, and because of the air acceleration it effectively sucks the car down onto the track creating extra grip.

How is this situation going to be fixed? Well, it’s not going to be until the appeal is heard… up until this is heard these teams are basically going to gain points that could be later taken away from them. However if the appeal is overturned and these diffusers are accepted as the norm in Formula One; it is very likely that during the course of the rest the year that the rest of the teams are going to just copy these designs in order to gain the same advantage. This in itself is bound to create an interesting situation, depending on how quickly other teams can incorporate similar designs, it may mean that the teams that gain all the points at the start of the year may not be the ones that pick up the points towards the end of the year. Hopefully this will create a wide open championship for the greater part of the year.

One interesting point on this though is that I have heard that the Red Bull team cannot redesign their diffuser in the same way because of the way that they have designed their rear suspension. Apparently they are using pull rod suspension rather than the more conventional pushrod suspension, (a form of suspension that hasn’t been used in Formula One for over 20 years). More information on the suspension is available here – http://www.formula1.com/news/technical/2009/0/626.html.

So what is my prediction for the race given that we haven’t even had qualifying yet… well I reckon that there is a good chance that Jenson Button and Rubens Barrichello may still do something special with the Brawn car,but definitely do not underestimate Nico Rosberg in the Williams…

Watch this…

I think Charlie Brooker may just have a point..

The second service pack for WHS has been released – more details available over at http://blogs.technet.com/homeserver/archive/2009/03/23/windows-home-server-announcing-power-pack-2.aspx 

This will be installed automatically on your machine if you have automatic updates set on your WHS machine.

Best improvement looks the connectivity to Windows Media Center machines and extenders, so I will try this out when I get a chance on my home set up.

Internet Explorer 8 was released last week and I would recommend that anyone using older versions of IE upgrade immediately.

Go to the main Microsoft website at www.microsoft.com to start the download.  In essence the main reason to do the upgrade is ensure that you have all the latest bug fixes and security updates installed, and also the fact that IE8 is more standards compliant than ever before.

Why does standards compliance matter? It now means that more web sites should look like their designers intended them to. I have already seen some benefits in layout on websites that I am involved with, simply because the pages render better. No more adapting your HTML and CSS to suit your browser – theoretically..

For those of you using Firefox, Safari, Chrome etc – well you probably don’t care anyway!!

This article says it all – Live Mesh is the must have tool for anyone who uses multiple PCs – install it NOW!

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/blogs/2009/03/18/microsoft-live-mesh-gateway-to-paradise/

Apparently the next big thing to hit the web will hit us in May…

Judge yourself from the blog at http://blog.wolfram.com/2009/03/05/wolframalpha-is-coming/ and sign up for updates at http://www.wolframalpha.com/ – how different a search beast will this be? 

“Fifty years ago, when computers were young, people assumed that… one would be able to ask a computer any factual question, and have it compute the answer.

“But it didn’t work out that way. Computers have been able to do many remarkable and unexpected things. But not that.”

Who knows – only time will tell I guess!