Gadgetory

this is an Asus GS mini it's a Windows Home Server and it is a flavor of Windows Home Server that is a custom firmness suicide done an unboxing video on it already and I also didn't have video an on video a video where I show how to upgrade the hard drive so I've installed an additional 500 gig hard drive there's one 500 gig included and remember - you can also use all of the expansion ports on the back including 6 USB and to eSATA to add additional hard drive storage to this particular unit this series of videos that I'm going to be doing over the next little while is going to be about Windows Home Server and what makes it one of my favorite pieces of software ever so let's have a quick look at everything we're gonna need first of all we've got a Quick Start Guide then we have our user's manual and then we have three separate disks so the first disk we're going to use is the software installation CD the software installation CD as it's probably going to tell me in the QuickStart guide actually I'm going to go ahead and put this in the drive first and then I'll go ahead and show you the QuickStart guide while we're working on that so I'm going to throw this in the district the software installation CD is actually an optional step but you can use it to install the Windows Home Server software on your home computer which will make it so that your home computer will be able to detect and connect to a Windows Home Server because remember the TS mini and many home servers does not have a VGA port so there is actually no way to hook up a display to it that means that you rely on your network connection to the home server in order to access its administration options so I'm going to go ahead run install and this is going to install the Windows Home Server connector so I'm gonna press next I'm gonna go ahead and zoom in so you can see some idea what I'm doing here I accept the end-user license agreement which I have thoroughly read and it is now trying to locate my home so I guess I better turn it off the lights on on the top that's a good sign alright so let's have a quick look at the Quick Start Guide while that is doing its thing so first step in the trick start guide is probably something along these lines oh I see setting up your TS mini aha see me missed this important step turning it on aha but but I've managed to do this so I've got it connected to a power plug as well as my Ethernet cable to a gigabit switch it's pretty important to use gigabit with home server because it'll work with ten hundred but it's not going to give you a very satisfactory experience and it should be noted that Windows Home Server will not run on a wireless connection for the home server you can have wireless client pcs so like that computer over there could be wireless but the home server must be wired ok so installing the software on your computer guess that was the first thing I did so I was slightly out of order ah so now it's uh couldn't find my home server because probably because I didn't have it plugged in at first so I'm gonna go ahead and go to find my home server manually and the home server name should be let me see if they're gonna tell me what the home server name is going to be hmm no no they're not going to make it quite that easy for me okay well why don't we try another automatic search so go back search again which is what is recommended let's just follow the recommended steps and see if that works if you installed Windows Home Server from from a disk on a custom PC then you'll know what the name of the home server is but I actually don't know what the name of this one is okay so number three getting started so once it detects the home server you will bring in the login wind up the login window enter the administrator password okay I don't know what the administer it is for this one adding a hard drive I already covered that in a separate edition of NCIX or rather Linus tech tips setting up user accounts okay so that's a step that we'll get to as soon as that is done I'm going to go ahead and stop the camera for now as a bit of an aside the second automatic search failed but I typed TS mini with no spaces into find it manually option and it turned out that was the name so I have I guess I've hacked my TS many homes over here so now it's going ahead and installing the Windows Home Server connector software it should be noted it doesn't actually install it from the disk what it does is the disk just tells your computer how to look for our home server and then it downloads the software from the home server and installs it from there to make sure that it has the latest edition so you can choose here this is this is one of the biggest features of Home Server automatic computer backup so it gives you a couple options do you want to automatically wake up this computer to back it up yes I want to make sure this computer gets backed up every day even if it is in sleep or hibernate mode so I'm going to go ahead and click Next a couple times and hope that it registers at some point there we go all right so the name of the Home Server here we're finally setting it up that didn't actually take that long I shouldn't say finally the name of the home server is going to be TS mini sure that's fine the password now something you should be aware of is that the password here we go must contain characters of at least three to the following sets uppercase lowercase numbers and symbols so I'm gonna go ahead and type a password and I'm not gonna show you guys this because it's my actual strong password okay so I'll go ahead the reason it has to be a strong password is that the administrator account can have access to the home server from a remote location so that means that it has to be a password that would be quite difficult to guess all right we are going to use the recommended settings to stay up to date and it's preparing the Home Server so I'll let you know about how long this took that I'm going to turn off the camera for now okay all that took about three minutes that's not so bad it installed all of the updates that I need I'm going to go ahead and click start and then I'm going to enter my password which I need two hands for a story okay show up I typed it right because it takes a little while to sign-in yeah I did not type it right sorry about that let's try that one more time oh I also I added an internet connection to my switch here because I realized that it was trying to download updates and I did not have a network cable plugged into my router I saw that there were a couple of hints that it gave you while it was installing and I there were a couple pretty helpful ones remember the password make sure you do not forget the password because it would be quite difficult to to riobueno lost it and then one of the other hints that I thought was pretty helpful was this one you can stream media to every room with Windows Home Server so you can stream to another PC or to an Xbox 360 hmm okay just a minute well I guess it was installing some updates and restarting because now I have connected to the Windows Home Server console the first thing that comes up is the console help it says welcome to Windows Home Server explore the Windows Home Server tray icon on your home computer okay and it tells you what all of the different statuses mean so right now you can see that it is grey although that's not entirely correct because it is healthy or not well maybe it's critical because it says it's critical up here whatever we'll figure that out later okay add user accounts organize files and shared folders configure backup customized server settings ok I'm going to show you how to do all of this so forget this alright so computers in backups so you can see the one computer that I have configured is the one that I installed the Windows Home Server connector software on so this one let's configure the backup so view backups right now I don't have any okay I wonder why I can't configure backups right now that's kind of weird maybe we need to set up a user account first all right user account don't show this message again ok I'm going to go ahead and add a user account so user account first name is going to be minus okay last name is optional my login name is going to be lioness now if I enable a remote access which means I can access all of my files from anywhere and I can actually use remote desktop connection to any supported PC on my home network so you should only use that for people who you want doing those things so in this case I'm going to say I don't need to bother with oh you know what no I should enable it because that way we can we can test it later so we can pick which of these options are allowed all right so that means I have to choose a strong password at least seven characters and it has to be a complex password so three different types of characters so set access to shared folders these are all the folders that I will have access to besides my own personal folder so if you have multiple user accounts and those will appear in there as well you can set who has access to whose shared folder so now we have gone ahead and created that account so that's a very strange thing network is critical because I do not have anti-virus software installed on my on K PC which I don't so thank you for letting me know that so this has been a basic setup guide shared folders let's just stop it there and then I'll cover some of the other features in separate videos