OT: NASeses?

[T i m]

Because it's a lot of stuff and two of his machines are laptops (one with a 240G SSD and one with a 160G HDD).

Plus we still need the system backups ...

Cheers, T i m

[Fredxx]

System backup? The only way that will work is with cloning. There are simply too many locked files for any backup software to cope with.

[Chris J Dixon]

No, on my partner's laptop, with the same Windows setup, it seems to be fine. I guess it is just one of those things that is too complicated to diagnose effectively.

Chris

[The Natural Philosopher]

root can break any locks...

[T i m]

Ok, thanks.

Quite.

A elderly mate called me the other day and was obviously very upset / frustrated because he had spend some time trying to sort out his PC but was getting nowhere.

I drove straight over and several hours later and completely by chance, I stumbled on the issue (after running all the test I knew and with no positive outcome or reason).

Basically he had decided to 'upgrade' the free Malwarebyes I'd provided for him when I built the machine several years ago for the paid version that also comes with AV. I had already degraded Zonelarm to the basic firewall as again, he'd upgraded it to the FW + AV, obviously forgetting the advice to stick with the free / basic versions of things or thinking he was doing himself a favour by getting more features?

It was only as I removed Avast (free) and was installing AVG (free, Same Co now I know) did it say it couldn't install alongside Malwarebytes AV.

In future I know to check he hasn't done similar things again (and he has in the past and I've explained why he shouldn't).

That's why I've provided him a trial laptop with Linux Mint on it ... so even if he tries to install any of this extra (Windows) stuff, he won't be able to. ;-) [1]

Cheers, T i m

[1] Whenever I've gone back to a PC where I have installed Linux for people, there has always been signs of them downloading Windows programs (several times) and wondering why they don't work. ;-(

[T i m]

Yup?

So, it can be done then and my WHS does it every day across several PC's without me having to do a thing?

Tested it twice when the wife's PC HDD just failed. Popped out and picked up a new drive, popped it in the PC, booted from the generic WHS client recovery CD, connected to the server, selected her user, waited ~20 mins while it re-imaged her PC over the LAN, popped the CD out and rebooted her machine just as it was the day before. ;-)

I could also open any backup image and pull a file, folder or complete drive over if I wanted, going back several months. It also only stores any file once (so no duplicates of the same WXP / 7 / 10 files, even if from different machines).

(See above) So, I'm guessing that level of support isn't standard across all other backup solutions? Why not?

Cheers, T i m

p.s. I'm hoping 'Macrium Reflect 7, Home Edition' (as mentioned by Chris) might get close to a raw iron backup / recovery solution?

[Fredxx]

Unfortunately, and in keeping with so many Microsoft applications, this is no longer available, and even Windows Essentials 2012 has been canned.

That is quite impressive.

[T i m]

New, yes.

I didn't use it that much.

It is ...

I have one of each version. I think the original was built on Windows Server 2003 and the second, Server 2007. So, rather than just dumping a product they offered it cheap (£5) with a (more) user friendly front end some extra features, like the 'Drive Extender' that allowed you to pool drives of all types and sizes, adding or removing as you pleased (you just took it out of the pool and it moved all the data off onto other drives) and folder duplication that spread specific folders across more than one drive.

It can run various services, like a Torrent server or music / video server and is of course a file server.

Mine is on a fanless Atom ITX board with 3 x 500G laptop drives, suspended on silicon bands (silent) and I added some extra cowling over the mobo so that the PSU fan sucked air in under the front, over the hdds, over the mobo and then out through the PSU. I later replaced the internal PSU for an external power 'brick' and just fitted a new silent 120mm fan in an empty PSU case.

When the last connected PC disconnects, it sleeps, but won't if the network access is above a certain threshold, or a temporary file in the Torrent folder.

I went to it after trying to build a NAS at the time, or setting up a Linux server and had I done, I wouldn't have had all these extra features.

I built the V2 WHS because I thought the first one would fail at some time ...

Cheers, T i m

[John Rumm]

You don't need to break any locks, Windows has a volume shadow copy service - specifically to allow backup software access to "locked" files.

[Rob Morley]

+1

[Rob Morley]

Most people probably don't understand the concept of an operating system - they'll think it's the desktop manager or browser or something else they can actually /see/, or the processor itself.

Of course some Windows apps can run under Linux, as long as they're userland apps and don't try to hook into the OS. When I finally dumped Windows I still used a few favourite Windows apps, and I think Wine has probably got better over the intervening years. You could give your users a VM to play in, but when it all turns to shit they just have to learn to live without it. :-)

[T i m]

Quite.

Q "What version of Windows are you running?"

A "Office?" A "Google?"

Yup, like Teamviewer (that threw some Linux geek a while back). ;-)

I'm sure it has. However, 1) I don't really see the point (either you are running Linux or you aren't) and 2) a program I need being rated 'Bronze' and missing loads of functionality seems pointless to me as I might as well run it 100% in Windows?

Been there, regretted that. Ok, it was running ok (running some accounts app that was Windows only) till Linux the user actually updated Linux, it ran out of space then crashed the Windows VM (never to return).

Or reboot and select 'Windows' from the EasyBCD boot menu. ;-)

The laptop I've just given to my elderly mate, only has Linux on it because I knew if I gave him a machine that dual booted with Windows (even if Linux was the default), the chances are he wouldn't go into Linux (defeating the object of the exercise). He doesn't actually want Linux, he's willing to trust me that, subject to very low expectations of what he can do on it (compared with what he can on Windows), it will be 'better / safer / more resilient for him.

That said, I'm still waiting for the call that says 'can I replace Linux for Windows because I really can't get on with it' and will happily pay the price (risk wise) for that (the laptop has a Windows 7 licence so can have W7 / 10 in any case).

This has already happened for 3 of the 5 people I gave Linux only (My BIL and another mate who only generally need Internet access for email and web browsing).

There are times when Linux can be a godsend though.

Like, I just picked up a couple of Thinkpads, a T420 and a nice i5, T430. The 420 came with no HDD so I stuck in a 120G and put Mint on it. The 430 came with W10 so I was able to download and run the BIOS update utility. Now I have a nice i5 laptop with a blank screen and that just beeps 5 times ... ;-(

Now, I know there are risks to upgrading the firmware on all sorts of things but in my many years this is probably one of the two that have ever bricked.

The Dell Inspiron I sorted out for the mate came to me with A05 BIOS version and left with A14. ;-)

Cheers, T i m

[dennis]

There are quite a few windows backup packages that can clone a disk on a running system without problems. Acronis being one of them.

[T i m]

So, matey ordered a Synology DiskStation DS216se and two 4TB WD 'Red' drives and installed the drives himself. I did explain all about handling the drives carefully and minimising static etc and he is fairly careful with such things (he's into photography and so knows how to handle camera bodies, lenses SD cards and the like).

When I powered it up I was able to find it on the LAN and connect to it with Firefox and I think I remember it asking to upgrade itself (via the 'Install' button) and that suggested it was upgrading the software and preparing the partitions for the OS (or some such)? I thought I heard a drive dipping out every now and again?

It got to 40% then seemed to hang, so after a good while I powered it down and removed one of the drives and tried again, and whilst it got further it didn't finish. Swapping over to the other drive in the outer slot (slot one?) seemed to allow it to complete and I was able to set up a volume, shares, users and set a static IP address etc.

Putting the second drive back in seemed to prevent the box getting online. Putting the drive in a PC seemed to confirm that it wasn't a happy drive at all (we got as far and doing a full format on it but it then just seemed to hang), so it's going back (to Amazon).

Q1. When the drive gets replaced, should we be able to just plug it in and then will the software ask what we want it to do with the new drive as we want it to be part of a RAID 1 / Mirror pair? Or will it need to format them both and we have to start again (no biggie as we made a point of not putting much on there just in case).

Q2. Can it act as a PrintServer to a USB printer ...and if it can, is it likely it would allow the Epson Status Monitor though (unlike the RPi PS we are currently using)?

Q3. Are there any cool things we should know about, like can it be connected to an APC UPS and run something like apcupsd (as the key machine or as a LAN slave)?

It seems a nice little box but I've not had chance to see how quiet it is over the sound of his two PC's (although it's looking promising). ;-)

Cheers, T i m