WHS2011 does not support AFP so that means your only option for making a connection is SMB or NFS. Time Machine only works with newer implementations of AFP.
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Windows Home Server 2011
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WHS2011 does not support AFP so that means your only option for making a connection is SMB or NFS. Time Machine only works with newer implementations of AFP.
Time Machine
This article is a few years old but the software is free so what do you have to lose but some time.
http://www.kremalicious.com/2008/06/ubuntu-as-mac-file-server-and-time-machine-volume/
I played with WHS 2011 and liked it but for a mainly mac network I went the Ubuntu route.
This article is a few years old but the software is free so what do you have to lose but some time.
http://www.kremalicious.com/2008/06/ubuntu-as-mac-file-server-and-time-machine-volume/
I played with WHS 2011 and liked it but for a mainly mac network I went the Ubuntu route.
The responsiveness with accessing a WHS 2011 server has improved with Lion client workstations versus Leopard.
What set up do you run if you don't mind me asking?
does WHS 2011 play nicely with the macs?
I have the default setup of smb. It's much improved like I said, but it still takes a second or two to connect to the WHS server from my MAC clients when I randomly go to access or save a file. I no longer need the connector so much to connect to my WHS 2011 server though. Sometimes I have to use it, sometimes I don't. Usually I'll just connect to the server in Finder without the WHS Connector. That's if the WHS 2011 is not already available in Finder, which it's normally not after I leave the computer unattended for a while (hours).
I'm not using Time Machine or anything like that though. I'm strictly using WHS 2011 as a file server to my Macs. I like my setup with a Macbook Air, MacBook Pro, and iMac as clients to a WHS 2011 Server. I have a mac mini server too with Snow Leapoard Server that I'm still learning how to fully take advantage of. We only get so many nice warm days here in Northeast Ohio so I've been much less of a computer geek lately.
As far as not having Drive Extender in WHS 2011, I really don't see what the big deal is. I just use software Raid 1 for the boot drive and back everything up to a single 2 TB ext USB drive. I would have used hardware raid but I didn't see that option in my mobo. I also have two cloud services I use in DropBox and IDrive. What's nice is that WHS 2011 will let me move the default folders, "Videos", "Photos", etc. to any hard drive I like. On my Windows HTPC I can also have multiple folders for any of the default folders too, so if I run out of space on one hard drive I can just point my HTPC to another hard drive.
Thanks,
I feel your pain re: the nice weather.
I am torn between what OS to use. I have never ever used linux and worry about setting it all up.
want to order the server up tonight ideally..
and not sure whether to order WHS 2011 for £35 (seems a good price) or whether to run something else
I feel your pain re: the nice weather.
I am torn between what OS to use. I have never ever used linux and worry about setting it all up.
want to order the server up tonight ideally..
and not sure whether to order WHS 2011 for £35 (seems a good price) or whether to run something else
The coolest thing I like with WHS 2011 is the streaming music feature through a web browser with Silverlight installed. I can sit at work and make a playlist to listen to. Obviously this is nothing new but it's real easy to use through WHS 2011 without requiring an add-in.
The only disappointing thing about WHS 2011 is the lack of add-ins like there were in version 1.0. However, most of what I need is already built into WHS 2011.
FreeNAS???
So just a followup question
I started this thread wanting to use WIndows Home Server for a Shared drive & BitTorrent downloaded for my mostly mac home network. After tying WHS, then Amahi I settled on Unbuntu (desktop version). I am happy with the setup except when I need to access the server OS directly. Remote access on my gigbit lan is very slow. I know freeNAS has a great web interface. Will it play well with my macs and BitTorrent. Od should I stick with what I have?
So just a followup question
I started this thread wanting to use WIndows Home Server for a Shared drive & BitTorrent downloaded for my mostly mac home network. After tying WHS, then Amahi I settled on Unbuntu (desktop version). I am happy with the setup except when I need to access the server OS directly. Remote access on my gigbit lan is very slow. I know freeNAS has a great web interface. Will it play well with my macs and BitTorrent. Od should I stick with what I have?
This post: https://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?p=13042520&#post13042520
Talks all about my experiences of setting up an HP MicroServer with 4 x 2TB drives and trying it with WHS2011, FreeNAS, Ubuntu and NexEntaStor. Hopefully it'll be useful for you. I used Seagate 5900RPM drives - quiet, low power, cool and in a RAID5 or RAIDZ array plenty fast enough to saturate a 1Gbit LAN port, and <£60 each from dabs or Amazon. Definitely buy at least 4GB of RAM for your Microserver though. FreeNAS and NexEntaStor will run with the stock 1GB but WHS won't. I got 2 x 4GB sticks from dabs for £29.99 but I think that special (pricing mistake) is over now and you'll have to pay £49.99.
I wouldn't bother using the SSD as a boot drive, it won't make any significant performance difference over the stock 250GB HDD, you'd be better off leaving it in your Mac Pro. For both FreeNAS and NexentaStor your best bet is to use a 1GB USB stick plugged into the internal USB port as a boot device, that's what I do (and it's partly what the internal USB port is intended for).
If you're using 4x2TB drives as I am, you'll need to attach the 250GB HDD (or your SSD if you do use it) to the secondary SATA controller which is intended for use with an optical drive, it's easy to do, but you'll need and extra 18" SATA cable and a Molex to SATA power adapter. By the way, WHS supports this config but FreeNAS, Ubuntu and NexentaStor don't, they refuse to see the disk on the secondary SATA channel (I've no doubt you could get it to work by adding extra drivers but I couldn't be bothered). This means that for Ubuntu you have to set aside part of your 2TB disks for the boot volume and then use the rest of the space for data storage. You don't have this problem if you boot from a USB key. I believe you could even boot WHS or Ubuntu from a USB key but you'd probably need a 16GB one at least, probably 32GB for WHS.
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I have an HP Microserver with 4GB RAM and 4 x 2TB Seagate 5900RPM drives configured as a a single 6TB RAIDZ array under FreeNAS using software RAIDZ. It took 2 hours to build start to finish, supports AFP, SMB and NFS and has been up since early July this year with no reboots, no rebuilds and no issues. I'm chuffed to bits with it so far.
Well I tried FreeNAS V0.7xx (need transmission support) last night. At first I played with it in a VM and liked it alot. When I installed in on my "server" a atom nettop. It took forever to boot and would hang when I was trying to set the mount point. After about a hour I went back to Ubuntu.
It turns out my biggest problem has been the rocketraid card I installed to provide sata 6 functionality as well as extra ports for extra drives. When I upgraded the firmware on that, 80% of my problems went away.
Things are going well now on the microserver with WHS2011. It's not quite as fire-and-forget as WHS v1 is/was, but it works for me.
Yeah, I tried out FreeNAS 0.8 and quickly noticed the lack of Transmission. NewEgg regularly fire sales Windows Home Server 2011 though around ~$50. I will keep waiting for FreeNAS though. This is not a terribly high priority.
I completely agree, they've massively over-complicated WHS2011 for home use. I guess that's because it's based on Server 2008 which is massively more complicated than Server 2003.
Don't get me wrong, WHS2011 is a brilliant home or small business server OS and it offered far and away the best performance of anything I tried. It's just that for me FreeNAS was nice and simple and had in-built AFP support, which just edged it ahead. If I wanted media streaming or printer sharing I'd definitely go for WHS.
One of the things about FreeNAS is they are taking it down a more commercial SMB route than home route, so are dropping support for features they see as home-user ones like bittorrent and media servers. Given that it's BSD based and given that there's a 3rd party plug-ins capability then I'm sure it won't be long before these features are added back in (they were there in FreeNAS 0.7), but for now, if you need these things then FreeNAS is probably not right for you.
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This is a very nice discussion of these OS's and I just thought I'd post a couple of thoughts. I have run a series of custom built WHS 2003 systems in my house over the last few years. Plus, I've admin'ed a couple of Server 2003 and 2008 networks in addition to a couple of linux firewall \ file server systems. And most recently I've setup a Mini running Lion server at home. I currently have Freenas running on an older system to play around with from before I bought the Mini server.
WHS is a great product. Really, really great. I love it. I will say that the reliability isn't quite up to par since over the years I ran it I had to rebuild it a few times and more than once I had some data loss due to corruption. All this was on 2003, of course. Still, I loved it and still think its a great product. For a business with less than 10 pc's its pretty much an ideal backup system, imho.
Freenas is fine if you don't mind messing around on the command line. Personally, I don't use the CLI enough to be proficient on it so its always a little frustrating. But, it will certainly get the job done.
Right now I'm loving the Mini with Lion server on it. The power requirements are tremendous which is important on a system that runs 24\7\365. I got the base model and upgraded it to 8g ram and connected it via usb to an external drive for testing. So far its working fast and stable. I find the screen sharing to be much better than the RDP system from Microsoft with much better functionality when the machine is partially booted. Plus, the Lion gesture to just swipe to another full screen app is great and makes remote access to the Lion server fool proof.
I've installed uTorrent and iFlicks (my replacement for Handbrake) and found the combo to be just perfect. The system has easily handled transcoding for hours at a time with a minimum of noise and heat. Granted, it probably helps that I've got it in a closet just off my home office. Temps on the internal hard drive are reasonably low but still higher than my custom built setup at 33c. That's not high enough that I expect it to significantly shorten the lifespan of the drive but I'd still like to see it lower.
File sharing performance is reasonably good. I'm running a gigabit network which the Mini is directly connected to. The biggest use I have for the system is streaming multiple HD streams and it handles that easily. I haven't bothered benchmarking since I really don't care.
All in all, a Mini with Lion server fits Apple's motto of 'It Just Works!' and thats what I was looking for. Considering the price, power consumption (or, lack thereof), performance, size, noise and ease of use, I'm pleased to bits.
Anyone want to buy some hardware to build your own home server?
WHS is a great product. Really, really great. I love it. I will say that the reliability isn't quite up to par since over the years I ran it I had to rebuild it a few times and more than once I had some data loss due to corruption. All this was on 2003, of course. Still, I loved it and still think its a great product. For a business with less than 10 pc's its pretty much an ideal backup system, imho.
Freenas is fine if you don't mind messing around on the command line. Personally, I don't use the CLI enough to be proficient on it so its always a little frustrating. But, it will certainly get the job done.
Right now I'm loving the Mini with Lion server on it. The power requirements are tremendous which is important on a system that runs 24\7\365. I got the base model and upgraded it to 8g ram and connected it via usb to an external drive for testing. So far its working fast and stable. I find the screen sharing to be much better than the RDP system from Microsoft with much better functionality when the machine is partially booted. Plus, the Lion gesture to just swipe to another full screen app is great and makes remote access to the Lion server fool proof.
I've installed uTorrent and iFlicks (my replacement for Handbrake) and found the combo to be just perfect. The system has easily handled transcoding for hours at a time with a minimum of noise and heat. Granted, it probably helps that I've got it in a closet just off my home office. Temps on the internal hard drive are reasonably low but still higher than my custom built setup at 33c. That's not high enough that I expect it to significantly shorten the lifespan of the drive but I'd still like to see it lower.
File sharing performance is reasonably good. I'm running a gigabit network which the Mini is directly connected to. The biggest use I have for the system is streaming multiple HD streams and it handles that easily. I haven't bothered benchmarking since I really don't care.
All in all, a Mini with Lion server fits Apple's motto of 'It Just Works!' and thats what I was looking for. Considering the price, power consumption (or, lack thereof), performance, size, noise and ease of use, I'm pleased to bits.
Anyone want to buy some hardware to build your own home server?
I'm hesitant to try Lion Server because for one I'm still learning all the inner workings of Leopard Server. I'd like to be familiar with how the server features work under the hood before I jump to Lion Server. Lion Server sounds like an unfinished product too, so I'd figure I would wait for the next version.
I use both Leopard Server and WHS 2011 at home. I use both for different features. Leopard Server is more of my application server (VPN, FTP, iCal, Time Machine, software update for 3 MAC clients, and eventually email and iChat) and WHS 2011 is more of my file server/cloud synchronizer and music streaming box. I think they are both great home server platforms and I wanted to be familiar with both.
I use both Leopard Server and WHS 2011 at home. I use both for different features. Leopard Server is more of my application server (VPN, FTP, iCal, Time Machine, software update for 3 MAC clients, and eventually email and iChat) and WHS 2011 is more of my file server/cloud synchronizer and music streaming box. I think they are both great home server platforms and I wanted to be familiar with both.
So you're not having any trouble with Windows clients connecting via SMB to your Lion server? This is a big problem for my home network. No issues connecting to SL machines.
Upgrade box on the way - Need advice
Ok I found a great deal on ebay! It a home built atom in a nice small server case with hardware raid support and 4 - 3.5 bays and a 2.5 boot drive. So I sell my small netop and going to my it's duties to the new box. What I need is central files storage, bittorrent downloading, itunes streaming or central storage and to hold my videos for a WDlive TV.
The new box has Windows Home Server 2011 installed on it. I have two concerns:
1 is Lion support
2 Do I need to mess with Anti virus because it's windows and it will be always connected uploading and downloading to a private tracker?
If WHS don't fill the bill I was thinking of trying freenas or Amahi Home Server.
Any Advice???
Ok I found a great deal on ebay! It a home built atom in a nice small server case with hardware raid support and 4 - 3.5 bays and a 2.5 boot drive. So I sell my small netop and going to my it's duties to the new box. What I need is central files storage, bittorrent downloading, itunes streaming or central storage and to hold my videos for a WDlive TV.
The new box has Windows Home Server 2011 installed on it. I have two concerns:
1 is Lion support
2 Do I need to mess with Anti virus because it's windows and it will be always connected uploading and downloading to a private tracker?
If WHS don't fill the bill I was thinking of trying freenas or Amahi Home Server.
Any Advice???
1. I can't see any problems with Lion, I don't have it myself, but from everything I've read it should be more compatible with Windows 2008 not less(though there do seem to be a lot of people complaining about it)
2. Yes. It's not that it's Windows, it's that it's connected to the Internet and running bittorrent. In that situation I'd recommend running an AV regardless of the platform
3. FreeNAS 8 doesn't have a bittorrent client and the plug-ins interface that is due in 8.1 isn't there yet. That means you'd have to use FreeNAS 0.7 or mess about getting a BSD bittorent client installed and working. I can't comment on Amahi, I don't now it.
Whs 2011
I been running Windows Home Server 2011 for almost a week now. Overall I like it very much. It is doing everything the Ubuntu install was but with a bit more ease of use. I have uTorrent & all the WHS services running. I have not installed the MS Launchpad on the macs because of the issue with Apples Launch pad but don't think I really need that function.
Transfer speeds over the network are a bit better that I was getting in Linux. I am running a Zotac NM-10 DTX board with a 2.5" boot drive and a WD 2 & 1 TB green drive. The system runs at between 32 & 40 watts which is perfect for a 24/7 system.
My only complaint is the case fans are a bit loud but that can be fixed down the line. I still have two empty drive bays, But setup a external ESATA drive as a backup. This way if the whole system crashes I can just load my data on another system or restore it back to the server.
I still think for a mostly mac network OS X server may be better but the price of the hardware really makes it not a option for me. Also running mini the expandability is very limited.
I been running Windows Home Server 2011 for almost a week now. Overall I like it very much. It is doing everything the Ubuntu install was but with a bit more ease of use. I have uTorrent & all the WHS services running. I have not installed the MS Launchpad on the macs because of the issue with Apples Launch pad but don't think I really need that function.
Transfer speeds over the network are a bit better that I was getting in Linux. I am running a Zotac NM-10 DTX board with a 2.5" boot drive and a WD 2 & 1 TB green drive. The system runs at between 32 & 40 watts which is perfect for a 24/7 system.
My only complaint is the case fans are a bit loud but that can be fixed down the line. I still have two empty drive bays, But setup a external ESATA drive as a backup. This way if the whole system crashes I can just load my data on another system or restore it back to the server.
I still think for a mostly mac network OS X server may be better but the price of the hardware really makes it not a option for me. Also running mini the expandability is very limited.
Sorry for the delay in my reply, I just saw your post. I have an all Apple network at the moment, so I haven't had any trouble. I do have an original WHS system running at the moment while I transfer some files. To access the Lion server I just input the server's ip address and it asked for a username and password and thats it. It's been transferring files for a few hours now with no problems.
I've got some friends and family that bring their laptops when they come over but I don't really share any files over the network for them. So, I can't say. Sorry!
has anyone got WHS to work with the apple time capsule routers? i'm using the 7.5.2 airport utility and it refuses to forward 80, 443, 4125 to my WHS.
using a static ip ok
forwarding ports to that static ip
click "repair" under "remote web access" on the WHS, but fails every time.
using a static ip ok
forwarding ports to that static ip
click "repair" under "remote web access" on the WHS, but fails every time.