jwcolby
jwcolby at colbyconsulting.com
Sat Dec 29 10:49:49 CST 2007
Mark, >Do I understand it right that you have purchased the hardware and are running it now already at home? I essentially built a system from purchased parts, but you can just install the software on an existing system. CAUTION... it formats all the drives as it installs. The software is an "OEM" license, i.e. it is SUPPOSED to come installed on a system, but basically it is licensed to run on a single "system" and if that system does the license does NOT allow you to move the OS to another box. Not that I have read the legalese but that is the idea. I had a couple of older boxes hanging around - AMD single core 754 socket systems. These systems are old enough that I did not want to risk putting a $170 piece of software on them and not having enough firepower to run it, or for the system to die later. So I bought a $50 motherboard and a couple of 1 gig sticks of ram. I had an AMD dual core processor hanging around, and I had a few hard disks and bought a couple of more. I also needed a new power supply, the connector from the old system didn't fit the 24 pin connector on the new system board. So essentially I ended up using the old case, a processor I had and a couple of disks I had, and bought everything else. I built the system and installed WHS on it. You can buy a prebuilt system from HP with WHS installed, drop in the disks you want and go. If you have an existing system you can buy thee OEM software and install it. It is a highly modified version of Windows 2003. >I am presuming that it will work in an environment where Win2K3 is installed? is that an OK presumption? Yes. You CAN NOT join it to a domain but it can grab an IP address in the range and hang out on the network. >I understand that it is only for home use now, but do you think that they will eventually bring it to the corporate environment ? It is AIMED AT the home but they do not object to putting it on a business network, in fact they specifically say it is OK to do so. >Is it a hassle to install ? It was a bit of a chore installing it. As you probably know Windows 2003 will pick up where it left off in the install process. In my case it hung SEVERAL times but I just let it reboot and pick up, reboot and pick up and eventually it got to an installed desktop, or at least it finally got to a point where I figured out I could get to the desktop (ctl-alt-delete). I then installed the motherboard drivers and after that it peacefully finished the install and worked. >I bought the 120 Day eval last night for approx 10 USD from MS so I guess I will receive the CD in a few weeks. I also guess that I can install that eval version on my own hardware Yes, I am sure you can manage it. I would not recommend it to a nubee who had never installed Windows 2003 or something like it but you have done so and understand the process. >In line with another post about a man that provides online backup services, Does any one else think that providing this as a service to local companies is a viable commercial venture ? I think it is, in fact I am tossing around the "how to" myself. Unfortunately there is a HUGE gotcha which is that the backups are not guaranteed to survive a hard disk failure. thus for this kind of business you would REQUIRE a raid solution so that any drive failure could be repaired without rebuilding the system. The raid is going to add to the cost of the venture. I actually do believe a backup right over the internet would work. What you would have to do is something like this: 1) Build a dedicated network, with a router, WHS with a lot of storage, raid etc. NO other machines of your own on it (for security reasons). 2) Bring in a client machine and physically connect it to the server, or take the server to the client. The reason for this is that the first time it will likely store a lot of stuff. 3) Create a VPN tunnel over the internet on the client machine such that the connector software would work as if it were local to the network. 4) Install the connector software and set up a user name with strong password. 5) As long as the VPN tunnel was up the connector would now do the backup at it's scheduled time. The backups only backup CHANGED clusters on the disk so only things like updated windows files, updated word documents, updated clusters of an Access DB etc would be backed up. This does NOT work very well with large files that change a lot - think gigabyte SQL Server files. You would want to continue to use another backup method for those, but for workstation backups this could be a viable solution. The problem is simply that too much changes too often. Likewise I am thinking a large MDB that gets a lot of use and gets compacted often. WHS stores things at the cluster level. It looks for changed clusters and any changed clusters get copied to WHS and stored, but the old clusters are saved as well. It is the old clusters that provide the "snapshot" capability. So a large file like a gigabyte MDB used by 40 people and compacted nightly would just have so many changed clusters that you would essentially back up a majority of the database every night. In fact this is OK LOCALLY, but the "over the internet" model assumes that not too many clusters changed and thus the speed of the backup will be high. Trying to backup a gigabyte file every night over the typical internet connection is not going to work well, especially with a dozen other machines wanting to share the bandwidth. >Since I read you post, I have been trying not to get sucked into this discussion, but it is too interesting to avoid :) It is a fascinating system, but it is taking some effort on my part to dig in and understand how and why it does what it does and what that means to me. And finally, it is good to hear from you again Mark. How is the family. Your kids must be...almost teens by now. 8~0 John W. Colby Colby Consulting www.ColbyConsulting.com -----Original Message----- From: accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com [mailto:accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of Mark Breen Sent: Saturday, December 29, 2007 10:31 AM To: Access Developers discussion and problem solving Subject: Re: [AccessD] WHS on Raid Hello John Colby and all my old Friends from AccessD Happy new year to you all from chilly Ireland I have been reading with much interest your posts on WHS. It is a fascinating product that MS have produced. John, Do I understand it right that you have purchased the hardware and are running it now already at home? I understand that it is not supplied as a software only solution, but does that mean that you had to buy hardware as well as the software, I would love to just buy the software and use my existing hardware. I am presuming that it will work in an environment where Win2K3 is installed? is that an OK presumption? I understand that it is only for home use now, but do you think that they will eventually bring it to the corporate environment ? Is it a hassle to install ? I bought the 120 Day eval last night for approx 10 USD from MS so I guess I will receive the CD in a few weeks. I also guess that I can install that eval version on my own hardware Finally, In line with another post about a man that provides online backup services, Does any one else think that providing this as a service to local companies is a viable commercial venture ? I currently backup a clients network to an offsite location, using a program named DeltaSync which is based on RSync from the Linux Environment and it works a treat, my only complaint is that it does not allow me to step back 1,2,3,4 days, and 1,2,3,4 weeks and then 1-12 months, I only ever have one or two snapshots of all data offsite. Since I read you post, I have been trying not to get sucked into this discussion, but it is too interesting to avoid :) Thanks, Mark -- AccessD mailing list AccessD at databaseadvisors.com http://databaseadvisors.com/mailman/listinfo/accessd Website: http://www.databaseadvisors.com