William Bartholomew

Windows Home Server is without a doubt one of the most useful additions to a home network. It provides three main features:

• Backup of client machines
• Shared storage
• Remote access to shared storage and client machines

This allows me to do complete backups both my partner’s and my machine as well as share files. As an added bonus it can stream music (and probably videos) to my XBox 360.

Because of the amount of work I do with Visual Studio Team System I thought it would be useful to have a Team Foundation Server at home and although I have spare hardware I didn’t really want to have to set up and maintain another machine (or pay for the electricity it would use!).

The solution was to install Virtual Server 2005 (which is free) on my Windows Home Server machine and then run Team Foundation Server as a virtual machine on the same host. The process to do this was relatively simple:

1. Download Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1.
2. Remote desktop to the Windows Home Server.
3. Install Virtual Server 2005 SP1.
4. Using the Windows Home Server Console created a share (called VirtualMachines) and grant my user Full access to the share. Because the Virtual Server Administration Website impersonates the user you connect as you cannot see or create virtual machines on the share unless you have Full access to it.
5. Open the Virtual Server Administration Website and login to it using the Windows Home Server’s Administrator account (at this point your normal user account doesn’t have the necessary permissions).
6. In Server Properties | Virtual Server Security add an entry for your user account.
7. In Server Properties | Virtual Machine Remote Control (VMRC) Server:
1. Click the Enable checkbox.
2. Select NTLM from the Authentication dropdown list. If you don’t do this you will get an Authentication Failed error when you try to remotely control the virtual machine.
8. In Server Properties | Virtual Server Search Paths change the Default Virtual Machine Configuration Folder to the UNC path to the VirtualMachines share you created (for example, \\myhomeserver\VirtualMachines\).
9. You can now create and run virtual machines on your Windows Home Server.

I’ve enabled media sharing on my Windows Home Server so that I can listen to music through my XBox 360 in the lounge room but I also want to be able to listen to music from my laptop when I’m at work.

Although my laptop is backed up to my Windows Home Server nightly music needs to be stored in the Music share on the Windows Home Server for it to be shared.

So what I did was set up a scheduled task that synchronises the contents of my Music directory to the Windows Home Server Music share. I used trusty old robocopy to do this:

robocopy C:\Users\<username>\Music \\<homeserver>\Music
/MIR /XF Thumbs.db desktop.ini /R:3

The /MIR switch tells robocopy to do a bi-directional synchronisation.

The /XF Thumbs.db desktop.ini switch tells robocopy not to synchronise the Thumbs.db or desktop.ini files.

The /R:3 switch tells robocopy to only retry copies 3 times instead of the default 1 million times.

I’ve set up a Windows Home Server at home and one issue I’ve been having is that even though the username and password that I use to login to my laptop matches the username and password I set up on the Windows Home Server I was being prompted to login.

I’ve concluded that this is occurring because my laptop (and username) is a member of my employer’s domain.

The solution to this seems to be:

1. Go into the User Accounts control panel (on my laptop).
2. Click Manage Your Network Passwords.
3. Add an entry for the Windows Home Server.