Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
If you did the smoke test with a minimal configuration, turn off the system
now and reconnect the hard drives and any other components you'd left dis-
connected. After verifying that all connections are correct, turn the system
back on and wait for the POST screen to display. Press F2 to enter BIOS Setup.
In BIOS Setup, verify that all of your devices are detected, including the full
amount of memory, and set the correct date and time. Refer to your operat-
ing system documentation to determine if any other changes are necessary
in BIOS Setup. Make any required changes, save those changes, and restart
the system. At this point, you're ready to install your operating system and
applications.
Final Words
This system went together smoothly and worked perfectly when we turned
it on. Server hardware is useless without the software to run it, though, so we
spent some time looking at various alternatives.
Choosing the operating system for a home server involves several trade-offs.
We considered the following operating systems for our own home server:
Microsoft Windows Home Server
Originally available only from hardware OEMs bundled with server hard-
ware, Windows Home Server (WHS) can now be purchased separately
for about $100. Early releases of WHS had an impressive feature set—not
surprising, considering that WHS is essentially a cut-down version of Win-
dows Server 2003 SP2—but suffered some serious problems, notably a
severe data corruption bug that went unpatched for far too long. The cur-
rent V1 release supports Windows 7 clients and is reliable.
Microsoft plans to release WHS V2, a major upgrade, sometime in 2010.
WHS V2 is based on Windows Server 2008 and requires a 64-bit proces-
sor, which obviously rules out upgrades for those running 32-bit systems.
The WHS V2 feature set has not been announced as we write this, but we
expect WHS V2 to include several major new features as well as significant
upgrades to existing features.
We ruled out WHS for our server because it would make no sense to buy
and install the dated WHS V1 with WHS V2 so close to release. If WHS V2
includes features we want—and they are worth the (presumably) $100
price tag—it will be easy enough to buy and install it later. For now, we
can do what we need to do (and do it well) using free software.
Desktop Windows
We have numerous unused licenses lying around for versions of desktop
Windows from Windows 7 all the way back to Windows NT 4. (Somehow
we missed out on Vista.) We considered installing one of these—probably
Windows XP—on our home server and simply setting up workgroup shares
on the server. The problem with doing that is that desktop Windows is not
designed to run headless, so we'd have to leave a display, keyboard, and
