WHS
More Windows Home Server Problems
This morning I started the have some more problems with my Windows Home Server. It just seems to eat through hard drives like crazy. It wouldn’t boot so I booted a live CD of XP that I have. This couldn’t read the C drive saying that it was corrupt and unreadable.
I ran chkdsk /r C: and left it. This took quite a while but completed. Still couldn’t read C. I ran it again but still nothing. I tried to reboot anyway but still nothing.
I am now having to do a server re-installation. This will be quite annoying since I’ll lose all my settings and programs but at least I should still have my data drives.
The last time I did this it took me quite a while to get everything set up again. I am hoping that this will last until Easter when I will buy a new hard drive while back in England. I have a feeling that this one might be on the way out. Unless it is something that Windows did to break it.
Either way, assuming this re-install works, it will probably take me most of the afternoon to get it up and running again.
Backups
We live in a world now where everyone has data that is important and they don’t want to lose but, where all this data is on devices that aren’t perfect. Hard drives fail, pen drives are lost, discs get scratched and (for anyone still living 15 years ago) floppy drives get put on a box of magnets.
The point is, backup is very important, but it is something that no one really considers worth doing until after they need it, by then, it is too late. There are plenty of ways to back up all kinds of data now. Most of it depends on what kind of data it is, and where it is saved.
It is important to remember, it is not a backup if it is the only copy. This might seem obvious but I have seen people who have burned their photo collection to a DVD and then think the data is backed up so they delete the files from their computer. Then after 6 months of using the DVD as a coaster on their desk they want to show someone their holiday pictures and find the DVD doesn’t work anymore. They are then confused because it is a backup.
I’m a little paranoid when it comes to back ups. I don’t want to lose anything so I have at least 2 copies of irreplaceable data that I would be upset if I lost, and several copies of incredibly important data where I would be screwed completely if I lost it (such as my university work, data loss isn’t an excuse for a late assignment). The problem with all this is that I am really lazy. I don’t want to have to remember to back up everything all the time, I just want it to run automatically.
Windows Home Server helps with this a lot, it can automatically backup the computers on your network everyday. It will turn it on at 2 am and backup the entire hard drive. This doesn’t take long since it only does an incremental backup. Some of the important data I keep on the server such as my photos are saved in a share with folder duplication enabled. This makes sure that everything in that shared folder is stored on 2 hard drives so if one fails, the data isn’t lost. Obviously this needs twice as much space so I can’t have it for everything.
I’m a little more paranoid than that though. I have a program running on the server that will download a complete backup of this website every night over FTP, and I have a plugin installed that emails me a database backup every night. The programs I use for this are FullSync and the plugin WP-DB-Backup. I realise that my hosting company probably keeps backups, but I don’t want to have to rely on it only to find that they only do it once a month. I don’t think that it is a good idea to rely on someone else to back up your data.
To stop my inbox getting filled with backups I use a useful Gmail feature, you can have + and then anything you want after the username and it will still arrive in your inbox, e.g. username+backups@gmail.com. This then lets you set a filter on incoming email to that address. I have these are automatically marked as read, achieved to skip the inbox, and labeled as backups. This stops them being in the way of my normal email but I still have them.
However, I don’t trust Gmail. A couple of years ago I logged in to find that every email was gone. Gmail never responded to my support request and I still don’t know what happened. That is why I backup my emails as well now. I have a program call Gmail Backup that I run on a scheduled task every day to download all my emails into a zip file. It is possible to run from command line so I wrote a batch script to do it and have that run daily on a scheduled task. This is on my Windows Home Server as well so everything gets downloaded into my backups folder that has folder duplication on.
I also use Dropbox. This is more for convenience of synchronizing my work between my PC and laptop but it doubles up as an extra backup. You can set a folder as being your Dropbox folder. Everything in the folder is automatically synchronized to their servers. If you install it on multiple computers then it will automatically download changes as well so it can keep several computers synchronized. You get 2GB of space on a free account.
I recently started using Subversion for all my version controlling of code. I didn’t use anything before. The SVN server is running on my Windows Home Server and the repositories are in a share with folder duplication. For an extra level of backup, there is the latest revision of everything in the share as well. ‘svn update’ executes every night on a scheduled task. I never change the code in that folder so there should never be any problems with merging.
Finally, and again more of a convenience than a backup, I keep a copy of most important things on my pen drive just so I have them when I’m not on my computer. I have a portable version of Dropbox installed on it and the latest revision of my SVN repository so that is another backup as well.
I don’t expect most people are as thorough as me about backup but I think that everyone should have a system in place, an automatic one is even better because you can just set up and forget.
It is important to make sure that your backups are in a format that is easily restorable. Before I stared using WP-DB-Backup I was running a script I had written myself to back up to the database. It worked perfectly except the backup didn’t contain any SQL to create tables so it wouldn’t have been very easy to restore. There was also no compression on the file so they were starting to get quite big. I ran it on a cron on my hosting and it was starting to fill up my web space.
Home server problems
In the last couple of weeks my Windows Home Server has been having a few problems. Nothing major, more annoying really. I think that I have it sorted now although it seems like it has a tantrum every so often and messes up again.
I don’t think that it is a problem with the OS, more a problem with the hardware. It is all quite old now and I built it out of salvaged parts from various different computers. I can’t remember the exact specification but I think that it is a 1.8Ghz Sempron processor, socket 754 I think. 2 Gb RAM and whatever cheap graphics card I had lying around. I think it might be a Radeon 7500. I don’t remember the make of the motherboard but I think that it is a cheap one.
Firstly the USB ports are temperamental, they will just stop working for a few days and then come back. They will refuse to work with some devices then work perfectly with another. I bought a PCI USB card to try to bypass this but that is just as bad now. It likes to kill hard drives as well. Even before I installed Windows Home Server and had XP on it, the hard drives would just die on me. I am on the fourth now I think. It has had just enough life in it to clone it to a new one but with read speeds less than 10 Mb/sec.
The latest set of problems seems to be with the connector software for Home Server. It would be connected fine, then the connection would disappear and not come back. I reboot the laptop and it was fine again. Everything else for connecting to the server would work, shared files, remote desktop etc. I could even login through the connector. The indicator icon was the only thing showing a disconnection and it wouldn’t run backups. I reinstalled the connector software several times to no avail and eventually had to delete the computer from the Home Server along with all the backups and then add it again. That seems to have worked. I have no idea what caused it though.
On Sunday I lost the network connection. Since there is normally no monitor connected to it, without the network I can’t see what is wrong. I tried rebooting it and it made all the right beeps while starting up. I could hear the hard drive churning away and the light was flashing. All seemed to be going well, then it made all the startup beeps again. I decided that I should get a monitor connected to it and by the time I had unplugged it, moved it over there and plugged it in, the server had rebooted itself again. This time, I watched it boot. No problems at all, went straight to desktop (I have it login to desktop on startup since it starts some backup programs etc. that run automatically). The only thing that was wrong was a message saying that some services had failed to start. I have no idea which ones or why. There was nothing obvious in the Event Viewer and I don’t know where else to look.
The final problem is that other people have trouble connecting to it on the network. I have set guest permissions on the shares but they still get an access denied. I think that is probably more of a configuration problem on my part but then the network in the flat is quite unreliable anyway it seems. I am loath to buy new hardware since we are leaving the country in the summer anyway. The ADSL modem/routers won’t work in the UK and they will all have European sockets anyway.
It’s not really a fault but I am running out of hard drive space. I would ideally like enough to be able to have folder duplication as well but I don’t think that is going to happen any time soon. I have it enabled on a couple of folders of irreplaceable data such as my photo collection but that is it. I haven’t tested them recently but hopefully they have some life left in them. I know that one of them at least is getting quite old. It must be nearly 3 years by now, at least 1/2 of that it has been in constant use.
I think that it might be time to get a new server. It will have to wait until the summer though when I am back in England. Hopefully it will last that long anyway.
Windows 7
This weekend I finally got annoyed with how slow my laptop was being and decided that it was time to format. Despite not being out in shops yet, I have been able to get Windows 7 Professional through the MSDN Academic Alliance with my university for about a month so after a long download on my 2 Mb connection, I have it running now.
I have only been using it for 4 days now but there is a definite improvement over Vista. I never had any major problems with Vista and have been using it for the past 2 years, both Home Premium on my laptop and Business on my desktop PC. Despite this, I thought I should try out Windows 7.
I never looked at any of the beta or release candidate versions of Windows 7 in much detail so this was really my first time with the operating system. At first I didn’t know if I liked the new task bar but after a few days of using it I have grown to like it. It has integrated the quick launch bar and the task bar into one and it works well. The task bar is a lot less cluttered even with a lot of windows open. This is the only major, visible change that I have come across. There are a few others but nothing significant enough to be worth noting.
I see that there are libraries now, collections of multiple different folders. The defaults are for documents, pictures, music and videos. They are both the users folder and public folder. I don’t really have much use for these since I only have a single user system and don’t use the public folders at all. I can see that libraries would be useful to a lot of users though, especially those on multi-user system. It does make the process of working with shared files easier. I store my photos on a network drive, I tried to add this to the picture’s library but it said that I couldn’t as the directory was not indexed. I looked into this and it seems that I would have to make it available offline. I don’t really want to have to do that so that was out.
I have also seen something called Home Group, I haven’t really looked into what this is but it seems to be a simpler way of sharing resources on a network. I have no use for this so haven’t really looked into it.
None of my day-to-day applications refused to work so no problems there. The day after getting everything set up though, I was having one problem where explorer would crash every time I right-clicked. It would recognise this and automatically restart but it was quite annoying. I found online that 7-zip caused this problem so I un-installed it and all was well. I have since re-installed it and there is still no problems so I don’t know if that was just a coincidence or not.
From a performance point of view it is not much faster on my laptop, there is a speed improvement but then that was from a 2-year-old Vista install that was long overdue some maintenance so I don’t really know how fair of a comparison that is. I opted for the 32-bit version of Windows 7, I was reading online about it and found that the general consensus seemed to be that if you have 4GB of RAM, or might do in the future, then get 64-bit. Those, like me, with only 2GB then get 32-bit. I thought about buying more RAM but it would be about £70 for me to buy 4GB of laptop memory and it doesn’t seem worth it. Once I go back to England next year I will have my desktop PC again. I wouldn’t bother upgrading my laptop anyway, it is over 2 years old and doesn’t seem worth spending money on. Especially since new laptops are so much cheaper.
Windows 7 has integrated perfectly with Windows Home Server. The connector software is working without any problems and the backups are working so no problems there. I have seen that Power Pack 3 will include better support for Windows 7 but I am not having any problems running on Power Pack 2. It has not been waking up my laptop to run backups at night as it should, but this morning, I noticed that Wake On LAN was disabled in the network adapter’s drivers yesterday so I thought that might be something to do with it. I enabled the option but it still didn’t wake up last night to run the backup so I don’t know what to do now. I need to look around a bit for the problem but maybe it is something that Power Pack 3 will fix.
Overall it does seem to be a perfectly good operating system. Maybe people will now finally upgrade from the 9-year-old Windows XP. We will have to wait and see if tomorrow’s release goes better than Vista’s release date, but from my few days of using I can see no reason why not.
Windows Home Server
A couple of weeks ago I had my server shipped over to me in Germany. The hassle that was caused by not having it and instead swapping between several different hard drives became more hassle than it was worth. Including my monitor and Xbox it was £110 to UPS it all. When it arrived, I thought I would try out using Windows Home Server after recommendation by Tom, and before today have had no problems with it. I am quite impressed with it so far, the problem I am having I think might be more due to hard drive failure than anything else. I might have to buy a new one and clone it on to it before it dies completely.
As for Windows Home Server though, I think the drive pool is a great idea. I have a lot of data and media and being able to just add more drives as needed and not have to worry about data being spread around multiple drives is incredibly useful. Until I switched I was using Windows XP in my server and I have to say that it is a great improvement.
The drive pool’s ability to have automatic folder duplication in case of drive failure is another useful feature, while I don’t have this enabled on all my drives, I do have it on the ones with important data that I would be lost without. I would use it on everything but don’t have enough space for that.
I have been using it to back up my laptop as well. Each day in the middle of the night, my laptop wakes up, performs a full system backup, and then, it should go to sleep again. For some reason it doesn’t but other than that it is an excellent system, I have been backing it up everyday for a week now and it is only taking up about 50gb on the server. It only saves the changes each day so the space used is very low. It then automatically maintains the backups as well so will delete them after a certain amount of time.
I have been having a lot of problems with this server’s hardware and think that when I’m back in England next summer I will build a new one. I was trying to remember what parts I have at home and think I might be able to build one with just a new system hard drive and motherboard. The problem is that the CPU I have is a socket 939 and motherboards seems to be increasingly rare. A new processor would then probably mean more RAM as well as it would need to be DDR2 but I figure there isn’t much sense looking into it now because hardware prices vary so much that it could be completely different in a years time.
In other news we have now booked our flights home for christmas, they were disappearing quickly so we thought we should get in there early, just 3 months left to go…
Pay day
Tomorrow is the end of our sixth week at Eurocopter and our first pay day. This will be good because we have been living on a tight budget for the last few weeks, we were given an advance last month but that barely covered the rent so this month we will have some money left over. We might actually be able to go out for a drink.
As a result of this, I haven’t really done anything since my last post. I have spent the weekends in, watching TV. Boring I know, but free. I did have the media server and my Xbox shipped over last week. I installed Windows Home Server on it, upgrading from XP. I have to say that it is a really good operating system. It was Tom who recommended I get it as he has been using one for some time. The storage pool is a great idea and works really well. It is very easy to add new hard drives as space runs out or old ones die and then to remove the older ones from the pool. It is all managed for you, you just make new shared folders, set the permissions and WHS handles the rest. A useful feature is also folder duplication. This can be enabled on each share individually and ensures that everything in it is always on at least 2 separate drives in case of failure.
I was thinking about my FYP yesterday, while it might be a bit early to start anything properly, I am thinking of a few ideas for what I want to do. My problem is that I am not sure what is expected. I don’t want to do something massively over the top that takes a long time and then doesn’t work properly because it was too ambitious. On the other I don’t want to go too small and lose marks because it wasn’t ambitious enough. I was thinking about using some kind of version control though, to protect me from myself more that anything. I have lost count of the number of times I have done something, then changed my mind and deleted it all, then changed my mind again but it is too late. I also have several copies of some programs where I have changed my mind about what I was going to do, made a backup of it and worked on. The comes the problem of maintaining 2 copies of the same program. A few months down the line, I come back to it and have no clue what I was doing or why there is 2 copies of the same program, what the differences are etc. I am really my own worst enemy. As to which version control system to use, I am learning towards Subversion, I have looked at several different ones and it seems like it will do everything while be easy to use. TortoiseSVN should help there. Coupled with my new WHS server, I can store the repositories on there and enable folder duplication.
All this however, will have to wait, because if my wages do clear tomorrow I should think this weekend will be spent in a Bier Garten.