Thank You For Choosing Shaw – 15Mbit Extreme

A number of years ago, well before MPECS Inc. was conceived, we had an ISP connection that was cable based and was extremely fast for the day. Then along came Shaw.

Since things went sour back then Shaw has come _a long way_ to bringing both their services and their customer service levels up. Since we have a few clients that are fortunate enough to have cable access in their businesses we have had our fair share of working with Shaw over the years. Thus we were able to see the improvement in their services and customer service firsthand.

So, as of today we switched out our home 3Mbit DSL connection for a Shaw Extreme 15Mbit connection and boy oh boy is there a tangible difference in the way our Internet runs here:

That is 1.29MB/Second with the rate bouncing up and down between 1.56MB/Sec and 1.24MB/Sec. The download is a test download of Windows XP Mode from Microsoft.

This is a Call of Duty: United Offensive demo game download from Activision.com:

This one bounced around between 2.30MB/Sec down through 1.84MB/Sec with it settling in at close to the 2MB/Sec mark.

Now, this is all fine and dandy since the time here is just around when kids will be coming home from school. Since cable Internet is a shared pipe, the real test of the new setup will be to run the above download tests during “peak” usage times to see if we still have those speeds.

With speeds like this, ADSL service seems almost stone age at 6Mbit . . . though one of our local DSL providers has just started offering 15Mbit speeds.

And one more thing, with a Windows Home Server sitting on our network beside our old SBS 2003 R2 box there are no issues with Shaw’s dynamic IP as our homeserver.com DNS has already changed to the new IP address.

Our home network is a prime candidate for Microsoft’s new SBS 2011 Essentials “Aurora” product when it RTMs. This is because our local Outlook clients here connect to our company’s Exchange servers instead of the local SBS 2003 R2 Exchange 2003 to keep things simple. Monique and I share calendars, task lists, contacts, and more via Outlook and Public Folders.

We will probably end up running SBS 2011 Essentials on one of HP’s new MicrosServers or maybe building a small box to run the OS. We have not had any time to test the product in its beta form yet.

UPDATE: I managed to finger fumble publish the post in WLW.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*Our original iMac was stolen (previous blog post). We now have a new MacBook Pro courtesy of Vlad Mazek, owner of OWN.

Windows Live Writer

Installing Windows Home Server “Vail” Beta On An Intel SS4200-EHW NAS box

The new version of Windows Home Server is now a public Beta and can be downloaded from the Microsoft Connect site:

• Windows Home Server Beta on Connect

Since we are dealing with Server 2008 R2 code, we can mount the ISO and copy its contents onto a high speed USB flash drive and run the install from there.

We are currently doing that on a hacked apart Intel SS4200-EHW NAS device:

The primary drive is a 500GB Seagate ES.2 drive. Note that in the image below the SMART status of the drive is BAD. We replaced it with another drive out of that pile of project drives before running the OS install. We will install additional drives once we see that things are settled in with the OS.

The SS4200-EHW comes with an Intel Celeron 420 CPU that is EMT64 capable.

But, it only has a 512MB PC2-5300 stick of RAM which is half of the minimum required 1GB of RAM. So, we dug around the parts bin and found a 2GB Kingston KVR667D2N5/2G stick. Once installed, we booted into the BIOS and found 2048MB of RAM available to us.

Since the SS4200-EHW is headless with no VGA connectors whatsoever, we needed to find a PCI-E 1x video card as that is the only slot available to us on the motherboard.

Again, in the parts bin we happened to have an ATI FireMV 2200 quad port PCI-E 1x video card. The card can be seen without its mounting bracket in the above image.

Once installed, we will be copying our multimedia archive onto the unit as well as configuring the PC backup with some of our workstations here in the shop. We will then crash one of them and use the restore disk to see how the recovery goes.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*Our original iMac was stolen (previous blog post). We now have a new MacBook Pro courtesy of Vlad Mazek, owner of OWN.

Windows Live Writer

Router/Firewall Ports To Forward For Windows Home Server

There are two ports that need to be forwarded at the router/firewall to the Windows Home Server box:

• 443 HTTPS TCP (SSL Web)
• 4125 RDP Proxy Port (RDP connections to the desktops)

Note that the 4125 proxy port is inherited from WHS’s bigger cousin Small Business Server 2003.

Port 80 is optional in that it redirects to 443 anyway. So, we suggest leaving that port closed and remembering the “s” in the WHS URL.

Once the remote access firewall ports are properly configured we see the following on an HP based WHS:

And the following on an Acer based WHS:

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*Our original iMac was stolen (previous blog post). We now have a new MacBook Pro courtesy of Vlad Mazek, owner of OWN.

Windows Live Writer

Automating the Windows Home Server Backup for the WHS?

One of the little surprises that we have run across with WHS is the inability to schedule a backup of the WHS unit itself!

We plugged in a large USB hard drive to back things up with, and ended up running into a roadblock when looking through the WHS Console and all of the settings locations for a backup scheduler.

This is a bit of an odd puzzle since the unit is supposed to be a _server_ for home use! :(

So, to get a scheduled backup, we need to go to a third party tool set and configure a key stroke macro to run via the Task Scheduler.

No sense reinventing the wheel, so have a look at the following instruction set on where to get the tool and how to configure it on WHS to get a “scheduled” backup:

• MediaSmartServer.Net: Automating the Windows Home Server Shared Folder Backup

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*Our original iMac was stolen (previous blog post). We now have a new MacBook Pro courtesy of Vlad Mazek, owner of OWN.

Windows Live Writer

HP MediaSmart Server = Neat

We are setting up a home network for one of our clients.

We are just in the process of setting up the Windows Home Server box by HP.

What a neat little box! It is almost bullet-proof in its set up routines and uses a very easy console for management.

At the SMB Nation Fall conference fellow MVP Kevin Royalty crashed a laptop that was being backed up by a WHS box. He had it restored to a new hard disk in under 2 hours.

That was a pretty killer demo and sold me on installing WHS HP boxes at client sites to backup key workstations.

And ... The HPs do Mac backup and selective restores! The HP Media Vault series coming down the pipe will actually do a full backup and restore of OS X Macs.

They are definitely something to look into.

Philip

Sent from my SBS Integrated Windows Mobile® phone.
--

ExchangeDefender Message Security provided by MPECS Inc: Click below to verify authenticity

http://www.exchangedefender.com/verify.asp?id=n9SJcxLs026235&from=philipelder@mpecsinc.ca