As with a lot of people these days I found myself with an ever increasing library of photos, music & in my case video files that needed to be backed up and still be available for everyone in the house to use. I first use an external hard drives which worked great for awhile until the started to pile up and one failed on me. So then I switched to a 1TB internal hard but that was quickly filled and it didn't solve my backing up issues.
Therefore a home server provided the best options for me and of course there are a lot of good free options available such as FreeNas & Ubuntu Server Edition and also paid ones like Windows Home Server (WHS). So I would build the system myself to both know what I was getting and to save money in these difficult times (drink).
I ordered the parts from Tigerdirect, put it together, downloaded and installed Ubuntu server edition. The install and setup was quick & easy but after using it myself for a couple days. It was clear that Ubuntu server is still not ready for mainstream use by the general public and there was no way that I would be able to get my family to understand, much less use it. But I will say that Ubuntu desktop is well on it way.
Now I turned to WHS for the solution to my problems because I've heard that it works great by editors at Cnet (Mr. Needleman) who actually have them setup in their home & use them daily. After wiping the hard drives, I did a clean install of WHS using a my PMP as a USB drive which made this install the fastest and simplest of any version of windows that I have ever done, with instructions here. You'll have to of course install the drivers that came with the motherboard and change the network setting on the WHS to match those of any other computer on your network. The transfer of all of my files took about ten hours(1TB of just video files) but once they were transfer I could access them from any of the computers on my network but a shortcut that will be added to the desktop when to you install the WHS Console software on the computers.
You will be able to set media player to get it music, photos & videos from the server, like you would from any other file. So too for your PS3, Xbox 360 or any other product that can stream data from a networked PC. In my case because I back up my DVD's and convert copies for use on my PMP, which is fair use (bite me MPAA). I have two versions of the video files so the DVD's are keep in my user folder that is password protected & can only be accessed by me (my user-name & password is the same for the server, desktop & laptop PCs) and the smaller converted files are in the public video files that every can access. I only setup one user account for me and turned on the guest account instead of setting up user accounts for everyone because it was the best choice for my situation. If you have minors in your house hold please remember to keep anything that you don't want them to access (ahem porn) in you user folder.
Now I did have two big problem with WHS because it wouldn't be Windows if I didn't have at least one problem. Firstly, I would lose access to the server from all of the PCs right after it had completed a back-up of any of them. The would still be on but it would would lose its network connection. This would in effect make the server useless for automatic back-ups. But the problem is solved by going into your network card properties and disabling the checksum offload and the segmentation offload to solve the issue and to prove that it works I ran 5 back-ups and I still had server access after each one without having to restart the WHS manually.
Secondly the for the remote access to work, it seems that I had to put the server's IP address into DMZ mode on the router which made me very uncomfortable to say the least. So I went a different way and tried LogMeIn Free which I have been using for the past 3 years to remote access my own computers and to provide tech support to my family & friends. LogMeIn installed as normal and works great as it always has. This way I have a secured way to access the server without putting my other systems at risk. I was also able to install the program Orb to run on the server so I can stream my media files to my work PC.
Here is the reason why you should consider building the system for yourself compared to just buying lets say the HP MediaSmart Server EX487 from Costco. My server currently has 3TB's of storage in it meaning a direct savings of $300 if I had purchased the HP and added extra hard drives. I also have more options to upgrade later besides already having a faster system now. Here are the list of parts that I use with links to see what they would cost you to build your own system.
For the case - Thermaltake WingRS 100 ATX Piano-Black Mid-Tower
Motherboard - Asus M3N78 PRO
CPU - AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000+
CPU Cooling - Thermaltake / Big Typhoon VX
Power Supply - Ultra LSP650 650-Watt
Ram - Corsair Dual Channel TWINX 2048MB PC6400 DDR2
and the OS - Microsoft Windows Home Server OEM
I hope this helps those who may have been having problems with their server or who were on the fence about building one yourself. Please feel free to e-mail me for help if anything may have been on unclear. My email is in my profile and you can find me on twitter. http://twitter.com/bknowledge
You will find a copy of the original with links to everything at bottom of this blog post.
http://mycast.orb.com/orb/html/public/blog.html?l=babylonknowledge&view=entry&entryId=55271

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