Windows Home Server - Installation & Exploration

hello everybody and welcome back to another video now in today's episode we're going to be taking a look at Windows Home Server which is a server operating system intended for home users I bet you would have never guessed that that comes to us from the year 2007. I recently picked this up on eBay and I want to give a huge thanks to today's sponsor lenode for making that possible but this is a pretty interesting copy because as you can see it was purchased at the Microsoft company store I've got I think one other Microsoft product that came from there and I always like just finding stuff with these stickers on it but this also is a brand new copy that has never been open before and that is of course going to change today because we're going to be installing this on probably the mid-2000s custom built computer that was sent to me by Hero rare heart a little while ago but first let's talk a little bit about Microsoft Windows Home Server so this was designed for pretty much any consumer who wanted to set up a little server in their house to back up their data from other computers monitor their home network even stream media to an Xbox 360. of course there's a ton of stuff you could use this for here's a little thing on the back so you've got a few bullet points that details some of the functionality you could get by using Home Server and if you decided to purchase it you had a couple of options of course you could just buy a standalone copy and convert an old computer into a Home Server as we're going to do in this video or you could purchase an oem system with Home Server pre-installed like the HP media smart for example which unlike pretty much every other HP computer does not have a display out on the back you only had power USB eSATA and ethernet which of course is extremely important for this thing being a server now you would think not having a display out would make this very difficult to set up for the end user but it's actually the exact opposite Microsoft intended Windows Home Server to be pretty much Plug and Play you would plug your server into a wall outlet and then hook it up to the network and you're done with the server Hardware you can just then set it aside and go to a client computer and do all the configuration and set up from there and I'm not talking about using remote desktop though there's theoretically nothing stopping you from doing that but Microsoft provided a dedicated application a console of sorts that you would install on a client computer on your network and then you'd be able to access and configure the server from there and every other computer that you install that application on though of course in our case because we're installing this from scratch on a computer we are going to have to you know have a monitor and keyboard and mouse hooked up to it to go through the installation process and get this set up and then we'll access it from a client computer later on in this video but before we do that let's get this thing open and break the seal for the very first time since this was manufactured so I'm just going to cut the seal here with our oversized pair of scissors and we will open this up and see what we've got in here first up we of course have the installation DVD itself which includes power pack one which is what Microsoft called essentially service packs for Windows Home Server right here we have the connector CD which contains the software that I was talking about that you would install on a client computer and we also have the home computer restore CD we've got a getting started guide right here we've got our system requirements it looks like we need to have a one gigahertz Pentium 3 5 12 megabytes of ram a 70 gig or larger hard drive and of course a DVD drive display keyboard and mouse and all that and right here we have our license which grants us a single license for Windows Home Server and we've got all the license terms and everything which of course we're going to definitely read through but yeah let's go ahead and swap over to the computer we're going to install this on and we'll get this all set up alright so I had to boot into the BIOS to double check the boot device priority and it was out of order so we're going to go ahead and just change it there and I've got the Windows Home Server DVD in the drive and we're going to boot off of it and see what happens so this computer just to give you the specs it's got a Pentium 4 as you can see it's got one gigabyte of ram so it does exceed the system requirements that Windows Home Server needs now Windows Home Server is a bit interesting because although it is based on server 2003 it does utilize the windows pre-installation environment which is what we're booting into right now for the initial portion of the setup though it does boot into the Windows NT style installer a little bit later on and it actually identifies itself as Server 2003 by that point but you see we've got a Windows vista-esque boot screen here in fact it is just the Windows Vista boot screen and this was in a bit of an interesting period for Microsoft because it was kind of in between Windows XP and Windows Vista because the reason why this is based on server 2003 and not Server 2008 is because Server 2008 was not out at this point even though Windows Vista was and this is resulted in a little bit of an interesting intersection between Windows XP visual elements and Windows Vista visual elements and you'll see that throughout the installer here you saw the Windows Vista setup background earlier right here we've got what honestly looks close to a Windows 7 style setup background but it's definitely you know based around the Windows Vista one but we've got a Windows XP style window here because you know this is based on server 2003 so it's going to utilize a pretty similar setup process to a server 2003 so I'm going to go ahead and select our time and currency format and keyboard layout and all that right here is where you would load additional drivers if it did not detect your hard drive luckily it has found ours here and the kind of annoying thing about Windows Home Server is you can't partition the drive from the installer here you only can install it on like you have to select new installation it says it will erase all data on your hard drives and you hit next and then it just comes up with this and it says it will format the following hard drives and volumes so this is the hard drive this is the volume on the hard drive and we just have to acknowledge that all data on these drives will be lost and you hit next and you hit yes and it just installs there's no way to select an individual partition that you want to install this on if you had like another partition of data you wanted to keep or another operating system of course dual booting Home Server with something else there's no real practical reason to do that because this was just designed to be entirely on a computer that you just kind of leave in a server closet or wherever and again you just interact with it through remoting into it from other computers so that is definitely something to be aware of if you were going to install this on a spare computer that you had but right now it's formatting the system volume as you can see and it's pretty much automated from this point here you know just copies all the files over and and you know does its thing so I'm just going to let it do that and I'll be back with you guys momentarily all right so we're in the process of restarting right now and I think this is where it briefly boots into the window NT style setup though I might be wrong yeah here we go so it's at this point where it actually identifies itself as I think Windows Server 2003 small business or something like that yep there it is Windows Server 2003 for small business and we're restarting once more it's gonna probably be a lot of this so just brace yourselves and check that out a Windows Server 2003 boot screen I wonder if that gets changed or if that's actually the boot screen that we'll have although you know it doesn't really matter because you wouldn't be seeing it anyway because normally you wouldn't have a monitor plugged into this thing when it's all set up and running and you'd probably have it just on 24 7. so we're back here at the installing Windows portion it's got some text blurbs that it Scrolls through you know just like in the Windows XP setup and it says it's going to take 39 minutes and I would suspect that's probably pretty accurate so hopefully it won't take that long but I'm gonna definitely prepare for it foreign [Music] luckily it did not take that long we're already done it's been probably 10 or 15 minutes it's currently removing any temporary files and we've got one minute left on the timer it didn't even take that long so yeah I actually don't know what's next I don't know if there's like an out-of-box experience or anything I assume there's something to enter in a user recounter in fact it might just use the default admin account oh and it does get its own boot screen that's nice so we've got the Windows 2000 and XP Pro style login prompt and it looks like it's just logging into the admin account oh and okay hang on it does have to do a couple more things it looks like and it looks like it's already done them because it has to restart again all right but it looks like it still has some updates to install because yeah it's installing some Services there Windows desktop search you saw the activation thing came up which is interesting I guess it hasn't activated yet this product key is you know a genuine product key it's in the it's in the installation disk case so yeah we can probably alt tab here and like can we do uh yeah so we can still get to the start menu here and kind of I know you want to just go in here and kind of mess around with stuff while it's still uh installing let's see what we got so there's Windows desktop search so it's slowly populating everything in here so looks like you got your standard accessories no games and yeah software update installation wizard so it is installing updates technically even though they're not like from Windows update it looks like it doesn't even have the network driver properly installed yet because the cable is plugged in so it's definitely not getting any of this from Over the network it's going to my computer here so it's called itself sys and it looks like it is currently taking up 3.48 gigabytes and for some reason it has that's interesting for some reason it has created only a 20 gig partition even though this is like a 75 oh I see okay yeah there's a there's a data partition so okay so that makes sense so it has so it just creates its own separate partitions here one for the operating system then this will be all the data and it's got a reboot again hopefully this is for the last time oh wait it just had to log out and log back in okay there we go so now we get this full screen welcome thing essentially so we'll click on the very Arrow looking button down here and now is where we type a password so we're going to use a super secure password of mjd and oh it has to be at least seven characters okay mjd mjd mjd and uh we need okay so it's got to have characters from uppercase lowercase okay so we got to make this a little bit more complex then so here's the automatic updates thing we're just going to turn this off and no we're not going to participate in the customer experience Improvement program that doesn't exist anymore I'm sure no so Windows error reporting and there we go so now it tells you right here you can administer Windows Home Server from any of your home computers you do not need to connect the keyboard mouse or monitor to your home server so it tells you to log off and insert the Windows Home Server connector CD into another computer and this is where it further tells you caution you know you're currently logged in many standard Windows Server Administration tools available from the desktop can break Windows Home Server we are going to disregard this advice right now because we are going to explore a little bit around the desktop here and we already went into the start menu button just to show you the start menus really minimized too it doesn't even have the username up here like I did before and you just got command prompt Windows Explorer and you have access to the server Home console and this is the program that you install on the client computers so you can access it here if you wanted to but of course it's not really designed to work that way so we'll close out of this and we'll continue exploring the start menu here I'm kind of curious what we got so we do have all of our accessories it looks like no games though so those have been removed uh you got all your Administration Tools in here under startup you've got that log on warning and it looks like it starts up desktop search as well and speaking of search have you ever been searching for a cloud computing provider with the tools you need to scale and deploy applications of all sizes well that's where today's video sponsor lenode comes in they've been around for two decades now and I've had a focus on 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use for this video is the Dell Latitude d610 so I've got the connector CD right here we're going to pop it into the drive and I've already got all the drivers and everything installed so this thing is on the network right now so we're just going to open up the disk here or it's just going to start automatically for us so it's going to locate the server and it's going to begin downloading the software okay so it actually downloads it directly from the server that's pretty cool and it looks like we have to install.net framework 2.0 all right and this is where it actually starts the Home Server connector so shut up wizard so we'll go through and accept the agreement and we'll let it do its thing and now we got to enter in the password and should have our password hint as well which is not gosh I mean I obviously knew what the hint was but just seeing it in the message box is pretty funny so we'll enter in the super secret password and it's going to say okay when you install this on your Home Server you may also need to update the Windows Home Server connector software how do you want to update the Windows Home Server connector software download the updates from my home server and install them automatically that's recommended all right we'll do that do you want to automatically wake up this computer to back it up that sounds like a good idea so it looks like it's going to configure backup for us right now which that's actually really nice okay and it's finished this computer will be automatically backed up if it is turned on or in sleep hibernate mode between 12 am and 6 a.m so I assume we can change that oh okay apparently our password does not match your password on this computer does not match the password on your Home Server oh I think is it talking about like the user account on here and on the Home Server need to have the same password your password on this computer will be replaced by the password on your server okay so that's exactly what it is so I guess every client computer connected to the home network has to have the same password as the server I mean oh we are logged into the admin account but I wonder if I make another user account I would think like let's try to go into you know what am I doing let's go to control panel just make a new user account here all right so we've got the oh gosh I do not want the resolution to be that high oh my gosh we're gonna bump that uh way down and uh yeah we'll get out of that get out of this go away and Okay so we've got go away we've got the same shared full go away oh this is one that we actually want create a Windows Home Server user account for easy access to your home server oh okay that's what it is so you would need to have every individual user on the computer like assuming this was a shared system would need to have an account on this computer and on the Home Server and they would have to have the same username and password so that's not a big deal I was thinking that like every user account on the system had to have the same password as the one on the server but okay that's a lot better so we'll just log off and log back into the admin account all right so slight little detour there but now we've got this shared folders icon on the desktop and this is everything on the server so it's already set up like that and it's nice that it just drops the shortcut right on your desktop so is this mounted as like a network drive we go into my computer it doesn't appear to be but you know it's right here on the desktop so I guess it doesn't really have to be but you know you've got music these are all the the folders on the server so you've got that software folder in here which contains the Home Server connector software that I guess it downloaded from the server uh over to here you got the restore CD here which is actually nothing in there I think you have to there this is to make a restore CD um yeah down the iso image file from the Microsoft website and blah blah blah okay and you know we've got a copy of that in here as well as well as the Home Server connector software but yeah and you got scheduled tasks in here too but let's go ahead and actually open up the console which we're going to make this a shortcut on the desktop as well okay so you could remember the password you get the password hint or you could reset the console okay so let's just type in our password Here again and there we go so here's the interface and now that we've got a client in here which is this computer XP PC it shows the operating system it shows it's currently not backed up so we could uh go in here you can view the backups now you can have it manage the backups automatically or you could uh you know modify some options in here if it actually had files you could restore files from the backup user accounts so this is where you would make an additional user account for everybody on the system if this was a shared system you could enable the guest account password policy if you prefer to create and maintain user accounts recommended set the password policy that you want for your home network oh yeah so that's the uh the how strong the password has to be so yeah this is like the settings menu it looks like we can probably get to that by just going to settings here and so it's got the time is the time set on here right yeah 2023 the server time is set to one two of 2002 for some reason so let's uh let's maybe update that and have it synchronize an error occurred all right we'll have to just manually type it in then so this is January of 2023 we got to go like way up here 2023 and it is currently the 30th as I'm recording this and the time is uh well this is set to Pacific time but it's set to three we'll just bump this to pm and just call it a day so there we go and Windows update uh we turn this off when we set up the server but you could turn it on if you want and here's all those settings that we uh when we first logged in you know all the things that it prompted us so you got the customer experience thing and Windows error reporting and so these are the backup options automatic backup number months to keep number of weeks to keep number of days to keep uh backup cleanup and database repair here's the passwords again media sharing here is remote access so you could enable I think there's a like a web portal that you could get to and you could also configure a domain name as well which would be useful if you didn't want to have to remember like a password or not a password an IP address uh of course there's plenty of ways of doing that you've got like no IP and all those other services that that you could use and then you can set the home page here so let's just go to Internet Explorer here it looks like it's just using HTTP and there you go so here's the Windows Home Server website you've got a random photo there you can log on and now it's going to go over SSL and so we enter in our username and password I cannot log on remotely by using the administrator user accounts okay so I have to then make a new user account in here so uh all right let's just do that oh and also let's I guess we can finish going through here so you've got add-ins you've got resources uh you got your specs of the Home Server there version info all that good stuff we'll just do this m actually since that's the um account that I created on this computer and we will enable remote access and there we go so this is the web interface so you can view computers from here you can view the shared folders and I think you can actually like View files and stuff so like if we go in here and yeah so if there were files in here you could you could do that we can go to software here's all the stuff in the software folder so yeah pretty nice and there's also that other if we go back to settings here there was that other interface the under website homepage you can change this to remote access and you could change the headline although I this is probably just going to bring up like the login prompt like if I were to log off and then we go just back to the root level here if I can actually select what I want to select known okay fine we're just going to hold backspace to get back up to here so we go here and yes we'll just redirects you directly to the login page instead of having to go through that home page so let's take a look at the well there's this network critical thing over here so what's going on oh yeah we got to activate oh and because I changed the date now it thinks because it was on 2002 and so now we've you know run out the timer so when I shut down the computer it's going to prompt me to activate it uh yeah that I did not even think of that so we're just going to ignore that for now but that's why it says it's in critical condition because it's not activated um okay so we'll go to backup here and I'm trying to see like how we can just can we start the backup now yeah backup now okay manual backup that's fine we didn't even really select what files to back up I guess it just goes in and you know goes through your like documents and stuff and we're done backup is complete all right so I guess we can hide that yeah it's backed up so if we go to yeah view backups and I think we can just double click on this and did it back up the entire volume files excluded temporary files system page file wow it actually yeah it got everything so that's nice it does back up your entire Drive there's only like five gigs of data used up on this drive so oh yeah I think I just mounted a local disk Z that has to be it so it just backs up uh everything of course you would need to have enough space on your server to back it up and um we can view the storage space by going to server storage here and you can see the status of the drive it shows that it's healthy here shows the total size and the free space so we're using 26 percent of uh oh that's okay that system and PC backups is 1.8 gigs that's the blue here shared folders you can't even really see it all and then free spaces uh seventy percent of the drive 53 gigs so yeah you would probably want to add some more hard drives if you were planning on using this as your primary server but that's definitely not the case for me because I've already got a Nas in my house on my home network that I use for file storage and all that this and this is obviously like pretty outdated I mean Windows Home Server came out in 2007 and there was a later version based on server 2008 called Windows Home Server 2011 uh it was a Server 2008 R2 actually but overall definitely I mean I'm liking this interface this would be really really easy to use for a novice user who just wanted to have like a backup a really simple way of just backing up files automatically on their system and uh you know that's that's what I would primarily use this for to be honest if I was back in 2007 and I purchased a Windows Home Server so yeah there you have it guys that is a little brief demo of Windows Home Server I hope you guys enjoyed this one if you did be sure to give it a thumbs up get subscribed all that good stuff and as always I want to thank you all so much for watching and I will see you in the next video [Music] foreign [Music]

Channel: Michael MJD

Views: 172,499

Keywords: video, michaelmjd, mjd7999, game, review, overview, apple, microsoft, unboxing, tutorial, windows, how-to, mac, os, operation, system

Id: 0OYsiYgiAC8

Length: 24min 12sec (1452 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 02 2023