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June 15th, 2009
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Having just installed WHS for the first time over the weekend I figured I would share some thoughts. Beware, technical content.
My main reason for using WHS was the stupidly large collection of external and internal hard drives of varying sizes which were getting hard to manage using XP in a drive-by-drive basis. I literally ran out of drive letters after mapping various drives from other PC’s on the network. WHS lets me consolidate them all in to a single pool of storage and makes adding and removing drives from that pool easy as pie.
My secondary requirement (and this will make some readers cringe) was the ability to run the WHS server as a second utility PC, for iTunes, playing video, music, uTorrent MSN Messenger, burning CD/DVD’s and other tasks previously taken care of by the same hardware running XP. Yes, I know you’re _supposed_ to run WHS headless but I’m currently treating it like I did the XP install, complete with dual monitors and fancy wallpaper, take that!
After some initial apprehension about whether WHS could handle being used as a regular desktop install, the only real workaround I had to do during install/config was download the msi install for Live Messenger (8.5) because it didn’t want to install from the .exe. I haven’t managed to get the newest version of Live Messenger running yet but I’m working on it.
The bottom line for installing and running apps on the desktop is that anything which will run on Windows Sever 2003 will run on WHS, this also applies to drivers for your hardware. I didn’t have a problem getting all the drivers running on a five year old socket 754 motherboard (Asus K8V SE Deluxe). I even managed to get my bluetooth keyboard/mouse and Logitech Z-10 speakers and LCD screen to work as they did in XP (using the XP drivers in compatibility mode).
As far as I understand it the Raid-lite system is really just a striped set with the addition of optional mirroring for nominated shares, all handled by the software and configured by the very easy to use console. There’s no limit to how much data you can set as redundant other than the amount of disk space you have (i.e. you need the same amount of free space as you are setting to be redundant, obviously).
I’m still not 100% sure what happens if a drive in the non-redundant pool dies suddenly but I’m assuming anything which was balance to that drive will be lost forever, but that’s really no different to my old system of individual hard drives and there’s the advantage that (hopefully) WHS will warn me ahead of time if a drive is going to die so I can remove it from the storage pool and the files on it will rebalance to the other drives before the target died (hopefully). Some automatic settings to make this happen without intervention would be nice.
From what I’ve read the system uses the boot drive as a scratch area while it balances to the bigger your install drive the better, so yes, use your 1.5Tb drive as the primary boot drive (I wish I’d known this BEFORE I installed mine on a 320Gb).
I promise, once I get another "utility" PC organised I’ll put my WHS server in a closet and stop using my WHS install as a desktop, maybe.
Final note, there is a site entirely dedicated to users of WHS with lots of great hints and tips and a pretty active forum, http://www.wegotserved.com/.
Discuss this post here.
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Tags: Hardware · Reviews · Software
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May 23rd, 2009
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That old phrase seems pretty apt right now. Life has thrown us a few curveballs, none of which are fatal thankfully, but we are certainly going through a ‘this sucks’ patch.
Sick dogs, sick kids, slow times at work and then 300mm of rain in less than 2 days. This turned our backyard from this:
Into this:
and ended up damaging the carpet in my office. I KNOW this isn’t the end of the world, but I can’t wait for 2009, the International Year of Suck to be over.
This also explains the lack of posts in the last couple of weeks too 
- Scoobs
P.S. Pepe just moved house too, thus nothing from him. Scratch is just slack, haha.
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Tags: Blogroll
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May 4th, 2009
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Well Relic’s DOW2 is a good game; not as great as COH is IMO, given their use of GFW Live and the lack of arranged team 2vs2, no push to talk etc… but wait!!! Relic are renowned for their post release game support, and once again look to be delivering.
Posted up the community DOW2 site are a list of some of the forthcoming changes, which I’ll reproduce here:
- We are adding a Two-on-Two game mode, with two new four player maps.
- Two-on-Two is a ranked game mode with leaderboard support.
- An improved, more challenging Skirmish AI.
- Push to talk voice chat and Company of Heroes style sub-selection options.
- New squad decorators and significant UI improvements.
- A performance test to help measure Dawn of War II performance.
It’s like Relic has read my mind. The first 4 bullet points probably resolve my greatest irritations with the game, outside of the voice acting and sounds of the space marines. As I mainly play comp stomps with friends, tougher AI will be most welcome, as currently the AI manages to make Noobs like me look professional. More personalisation of the in game units is also an excellent addition.
We can expect the patch sometime in May, although with Relic, you never know.
As for Demigod, Stardock are steadily improving the experience, from a networking point of view. The game really is excellent, oozes quality, but is still a hit or miss affair online using the in-game matchmaking service.
Stardock are regularly updating the forums with their progress on this front, and are fairly honest about the problems that exist. I’m more confident now that things will be resolved, but it still looks like another week or so before the kinks are finally ironed out.
In the meantime, many players wanting to get into large custom games are being encouraged to use Gameranger, which operates a little like Hamachi as far as I am aware. Gameranger are also being kind enough to require patched versions of Demigod, which ought to make life a little harder for pirates, and make it easier for legitimate users to find a game on the service.
Comments are welcome in the forums
DOW2 Thread
Demigod Thread
- Scoobs
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Tags: PC Games
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April 27th, 2009
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Now for something completely not gaming related…
I recently bought a 2005 Mazda2 for my wife and wanted to do something about the lack of audio options by giving it iPod connectivity… here’s how I did it.
Mazda2 iPod / MP3 Mod
- Pepe
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Tags: Hardware · Reviews
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April 24th, 2009
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Well, I’ve been travelling a bit, but I managed to get a few Demigod single player games in beforehand, along with a lot of Peggle since I’ve arrived here.
First to Demigod; well it’s a very fun game. It’s beautiful and addictive and has just the right amount of ‘cheesiness’. It also has some ‘cool’ element that I can’t quite put my finger on. I’ve still not ventured online, but almost daily updates from the developers are giving me a lot of hope of the game crossing the final hurdle into greatness. Apparently we’ll (Australia, Europe at least) will be getting a proxy server for the game to assist with connectivity problems. Improvements are being made to the lobby, the interface and the behind the scenes networking.
Oh, I nearly forgot, if you have trouble launching demigod, there are known issues with Comodo and with Google Desktop. There is a stub exe from the developers available on the website that might help. This thread contains a link to the stub exe and helpful advice on game-launch problems.
It’s a shame Stardock borked the release window, but the signs are very promising. Stardock are also promising a more interesting single player experience in the not too distant future.
Since I’ve been up in the sunnier climes of Queensland, I’ve had a few ‘hot-seat’ games of Peggle (at night) with people standing around the computer groaning, cheering or otherwise carrying on. Such a simple game, soooo addictive. It reminded me of the arcade days when I used to meet up with friends and play R-Type, Mario, Gauntlet etc in front of groups of people. I do kind of miss those more ‘social’ days. One can see how the Wii manages to suck so many families in really (socially I mean).
I’ll be firing up Sins of a Solar Empire (Entrenchment) tonight, assuming Peggle doesn’t nudge it out of the road
We have a ‘what have you been playing thread’ right here. Feel free to contribute
- Scoobs
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Tags: Blogroll · PC Games
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