I might get laughed at by certain people for admitting this, but I've just today setup Windows Home Server as a new addition to our network. I was after a hassle-free backup solution that once setup would manage itself and I'm happy to report that it does exactly that as well as a couple of other things that are probably edge-case-uses for me.

I particularly like the remote access feature as it allows me to retrieve files on the server from anywhere. I haven't actually tried it yet though so I don't know if it works or how good it is however I must give props to the developers for coming up with what is the smoothest remote access setup I have ever seen. It consisted of me clicking a button and everything, including my router and very own domain, being automatically configured for me!

What a far cry from the port forwarding, dynamic DNS and DMZ hell I had to go through for my pc at work in anticipation of my upcoming holiday. I never did manage to get that working properly with a dynamic dns and have ended up using the dyndns.org service just to tell me the public IP address of the office.

While it was easy for me, I can imagine the hell people with routers that refused to play with windows home server would go through with this feature. In my experience software that can automatically configure itself tends to be a right pain in the arse when it has to be done manually. Now if only the rest of the installation had been so wonderful.

The installation not only took forever, it also rebooted an incredible number of time (I lost count), and called itself different things throughout the process - it's clearly the first version and a thrown together one at that. The startup screen still shows Windows Server 2003, not that I have a monitor attached to the server anymore.

or

or

It's a bit of everything

I got a bit of a scare after installation because it hadn't picked up my network adapter so I had to go hunting for one. The motherboard disk of course didn't recognise Windows Home Server and gace me another panicked moment, but luckily there were still drivers on there that I could install manually.

Thankfully it's all setup now so I can just leave it to do its 'thing'.