A first look: Inside Windows Home Server

Written by IT News on 7:37 PM

Microsoft has released its latest version of Windows Home Server (WHS) to beta testers. Shawn Morton takes you inside the WHS console and examines the capabilities and limitations of this application

Recently, Microsoft released its latest version of Windows Home Server (WHS) to beta testers. The following screens take you inside the WHS console.

Login screen

WHS uses a very simple login screen (Figure A). Provide the server password and you're in!

Computers and backup

The first screen you'll see after logging into your WHS console is the Computers & Backup tab (Figure B). It shows you all of the clients that are connected to WHS, the operating system each is running, and whether they are backed up.

The reason two of the PCs are grayed out in this screenshot is that I had just installed the latest version of WHS and had not yet run the Home PC Connector CD on the other two machines.

User Accounts

The User Accounts screen shows you all of the users who are set up to access WHS on your network (Figure C). Information about each account includes whether it is enabled and whether it can connect remotely to the WHS box from the Web.

An interesting thing about user accounts is that they need to match the account on the client PC. So if your username is "JoeSchmoe" and your password is "12345," your WHS logon name and password need to be "JoeSchmoe" and "12345."

After getting your user account set up, you only need the server password to access WHS.

Shared Folders

The Shared Folders screen shows all of the default and custom shares on your WHS box (Figure D). By default, WHS creates Music, Photos, Public, Software and Video. It also creates a new share for each account listed on the User Accounts tab.

When you run the Home PC Connector CD in a client machine, each of the default shares is automatically added to the client PC. While setting up shared folders isn't difficult, it is a nice shortcut to have built into the software. You definitely won't be answering questions like "Where do my photos go on the server?"

If one copy of your files isn't enough, you can choose to duplicate any share on your WHS box by toggling the Duplication setting (the fourth column from the left) to On. The default state for Duplication is Off.