Small Business Server - WHS 2011

[Cain]

Windows Small Business Server 20

[WalkinTarget]

do you remote access with the web thingy, or WebDav??

And how do you set up a remote access web address?? Do I need my own domain, or not?>

Remote access. WHS provides you with a Windows Live custom domain nameserver. I do have my own domain, but I keep that separate for webhosting exclusively, no remote access.

[Cain]

Thx WT I was thinking they had that.

[WalkinTarget]

Just an update to pass along on a stupid MS bugaboo on the initial install of the WHS 2011 OS:

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/bott/befor...seriously/3134

I don’t believe I have ever read instructions quite like those I found in Installing and Configuring Windows Home Server 2011. Follow along…

In a yellow box, under the bold heading Important, you’ll find these instructions:

Before you install Windows Home Server 2011, set your BIOS clock to match the time and date for the Pacific Time Zone (PST) regardless of where you are located in the world. After successfully installing Windows Home Server 2011 and joining client computers, do not reset the time, date, and time zone on the Dashboard for another day.

If you do not set your server time to PST, you should not use the server or connect computers to it until the number of hours pass that equals the difference between your time and PST.

[Dead...Again]

[Apache Warrior]

Apache

[Slaughter]

One thing to consider is that you don't run afoul of the EULA for Home Server (since it wouldn't be for a 'home').

[WalkinTarget]

One thing to consider is that you don't run afoul of the EULA for Home Server (since it wouldn't be for a 'home').

I don't think that MS is concerned about the environment, as long as you keep the amount of PCs/users to 10, which is the limit for a 'home' domain using WHS.
I had at one time 9 PCs backed up and 'active' on my WHS, but it'd be interesting to see if the EULA is specific about its environment.

[mapes]

do you remote access with the web thingy, or WebDav??

And how do you set up a remote access web address?? Do I need my own domain, or not?>

WebDAV is a file protocol. It allows you to use a webserver as a file sever using a web browser as the client (i.e. you get views of folders and files as icons on the client and can push and pull files).

You could use VNC or RDP. I'm not sure if WHS is licensed for the windows style VPN's. If it is I'd setup a VPN to the server and then use remote desktop through the VPN. I would NOT poke a hole in my firewall straight to a machine running VNC or Remote Desktop. Bad folks out there are the internet have scripts running all of the time trying to find machines like that. When they find them they then run brute force attacks against them.

For example I have a linux server that has SSH running (Secure Shell sort like an encrypted session to a dos prompt). SSH runs on TCP port 22. My firewall forwards any inbound connection on TCP port 22 to my linux box. The problem is that when I checked my logs I could see automated brute force attacks against my server. The solution for me was to change my firewall. Now my firewall listens for connections on TCP port 2222 and forwards that traffic to port 22 on my server. The scripts have no idea what port 2222 is so they don't report it as SSH.

[NateTheBrewer]

This reminded me of the thread... Why would you ever buy a WHS license when there are a ton of open source file-sharing platforms out there - especially since you already had the hardware for it. I know your experiences with the other one were an issue, but I have never had that issue.

I have run many iterations of FreeNAS on a TON of different hardware platforms, and running CIFS/SAMBA (Windows File Sharing), NFS, and FTP I have never had an issue with permissions and locked open/closed files. The standards aren't the problem, its probably user permissions, etc.

To test, I took a backup of our entire production database (which now and then does get locked open files) which is using a Sybase Advantage database engine, and deployed the backup on one of my fileservers running CIFS on FreeNAS at home. I actually launched all of the applications we run in the office that did not rely on external hardware to run, as well as 3 workstations, and was able to edit multiple tables simultaneously from different workstations. This is all WITHOUT the database engine we have running in our production environment on windows server 2003 (yep, haven't bit the bullet and upgraded yet due to how many licenses we would have to get). I had done this to test our disaster recovery plan of working from a backup on an offsite fileserver and some laptops as workstations for a few days until we can rebuild our office from cold spares.

I know WHS does a few creative things with backups, but you can run something like Cobian on any client machines and use that to backup to a NAS. Basically, you are using WHS as a NAS...