The Firstwave

We have had Windows Home Server 2008 in our action pack for quite a while now but haven’t really paid much attention to it, so I decided to see if it links in with Media Centre and what exactly it can do, with the release of Power Pack 2 for Home Server, Microsoft have added the ability for it to link with Media Centre i would have thought this would have been a good idea from the outset but never mind the facility is there now.

I installed Home Sever into a vm on my Hyper-V machine all went very smoothly as expected because Home Server seems to be a modified version of SBS 2003 without Exchange 2003 but with some added extras such as a backup facility that will automatically backup any machine that you connect to the server.

It also unique way of pooling hard drives to make it  look like they are part of one big drive a bit like raid but not redundant by default, although you can add extra drives to act as secondary drives so the server can create automatic backups of your files.

Now depending on how many files you have and how many pc’s you have being backed up as you can imagine this can start to use a lot of storage but adding extra storage is easy enough you just put the new drive into the system or plug in an external drive and add it to the pool, the server sorts the rest out.

I have decided to use Home Server as my main media server for my home mainly because of the storage pool and the client computer backup facility now that it integrates with media centre

I had a bit of a strange problem with the library in VMC it started to display folders that I had not added for example the root of c: and my music was being displayed in the videos section, I tried to remove all folders from within media centre and also from within media player but random folders still started to appear.

So I thought their might be a problem with the database but their is no obvious way with media player to repair or delete it, this needs to be done manually.

Clear all watched folders from WMP 11
Clear all libraries in VMC
Delete all files from c:\Users\[username]\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Media Player (where the database is located)
Re-Set up libraries in VMC

I decided i was going to upgrade my copy of Hyper-V server R2 Beta over the weekend to the RC version, after checking the Microsoft website for any possible repercussions it seemed to suggest it was a simple upgrade, so after some full backup of the guest operating systems (always a wise move before making any changes) i shut down the os’s and put the disk in and ran setup.

It went throught the usual install routine copy files, expanding files etc and then rebooted, all seemed ok accept after a few minutes when i would normally be able to access my server, nothing, oh for god’s sake was the first thing that ran through my mind, and out of my mouth for that matter.

But a quick look in Hyper-V manager revealed it couldn’t find 2 passthrough drives, although they were still in the list so i simply selected them again and hit start and it began to boot, i didn’t look into the problem at any depths i was just glad it started working, but the only thing i noticed was the drives were both 500gb Samsung hard drives.

Today on one of our servers one of our users reported that there Blackberry had stopped receiving emails, when i looked at the service i noticed the blackberry router and MDS service had stopped, the router restarted ok but the MDS service kept saying

‘Could not start the BlackBerry MDS on Local Computer. Error 203: The system could not find the environment option that was entered.’

After a little searching i found out it was down to the Blackberry Enterprise Server was not pointing to jvm.dll possibly due to a resent Java JRE upgrade.

The solution was to point it to the correct location in the registry. Taken from the Blackberry Knowledge Base KB04329

To resolve this issue, complete the following steps:

1. Open the Registry Editor.
2. Go to the registry key listed above to check for the ImagePath string value.
3. If the ImagePath string value does not exist, repair the BlackBerry Enterprise Server installation through Add/Remove Programs. This updates the BlackBerry Mobile Data Service registry keys. For more information, see the BlackBerry Enterprise Server Installation Guide.Note: For BlackBerry Enterprise Server software version 4.1.3 to 4.1.6, the option to repair is not available. Re-apply the service pack to replace the registry key.

   If the ImagePath string value exists, double-click it and type the correct path to the jvm.dll file in the Value data field, as shown in the following example for BlackBerry Enterprise Server software version 4.1:

   “C:\Program Files\Research In Motion\BlackBerry Enterprise Server\MDS\bin\bmds.exe” -s jvmpath=”C:\Program Files\Java\<JRE folder>\bin\client\jvm.dll” -XX:+DisableExplicitGC-Xss64K -Xmx256M -Xms96M -XX:NewSize=32M -XX:MaxNewSize=96M-XX:NewRatio=2 classpathdir=”C:\Program Files\Research In Motion\BlackBerry Enterprise Server\MDS\classpath\\” wrkdir=”C:\Program Files\Research In Motion\BlackBerry Enterprise Server\MDS\Servers\<server_name>\\” webserverdir=”C:\Program Files\Research In Motion\BlackBerry Enterprise Server\MDS\webserver\\” -log.console -rbes “<server_name>”

   where <server_name> is the name of the BlackBerry Enterprise Server MDS Connection Service and <JRE folder> is the name of the JRE folder located in C:\Program Files\Java\.

4. Press ENTER and close the Registry Editor.
5. Restart BlackBerry MDS from the Windows administrative tools.

I have just come across a strange problem accessing ftp site via ie7 on a client machine on an SBS 2003 nework specifically the companies house website, when the client right tried to right click and save as they would get ‘The connection the the server has been reset’ error message and the good old this page cannot be displayed when trying to browse the ftp site.

On their particular setup they have a adsl modem connected to the 2nd nic on the sbs server so all the internet traffic is routed via the server.

The solution was to disable Receive Side Scaling on the Server (Broadcom) nic not the internet nic i right clicked the Local Area Connection and clicked properties,click configure next the to the networ adaptor, click the advanced tab, choose Receive Side Scaling and set to disable, (Warning this temporarily disconnects the server from the network).

After a little bit more research on this problem i came across a KB article on the subject appearently it effects serveral versions of Windows server 2003 SP1 & SP2 and SBS 2003 & R2, in this article Microsoft suggest disabling RSS via a registry key although i have not tried this solution. KB927695

Well its my first post and i just  finished installing SBS 2008 on Hyper-v server R2 Beta with no real problems what so ever i expected it to run incredibly slow but i was pleasently supprised with the speed of it, there were a couple of quirks when it comes to adding extra hard drives etc you need to take the disk offline so it is not availible to the host operating system using the List Disk command at the command prompt, for example

type DISKPART

type List Disk

type Select Disk (number)

type Offline Disk

this them makes the disk offline and it is availible to the guest os in the hyper v manager, appart from that i am otherwise quite impressed.