Windows Home Server Hiccups

Amongst other things, I’m currently testing the beta software of Microsoft’s Windows Home Server. Along with about 10,000 other people, apparently.

It is only the second beta, so one should expect bugs; and in that I’ve not been disappointed.

I’ve had a couple of problems with the Connector software. On one machine (which was running Vista at the time), it failed to find the server machine, even though it sits on the same subnet of my home network. That machine has now had Windows XP re-installed on it for other reasons, and now it is happily sending backups through to the server.

But far more seriously, on another machine (also running Vista) the Connector service will lock up the machine completely after some time has elapsed. The only way to deal with it once it locks up is to boot into Safe Mode, and disable the Connector service. I suspect that it is conflicting with one, or even worse, a combination of the 73 other services that the machine happens to be running. I see from the bug reports that I’m not the only person suffering from this, so hopefully Microsoft will get around to looking at it at some point.

Another bug that has started ringing alarm bells with me is that someone has reported that moving his 26,000 photos onto the server has corrupted the photos’ metadata. This would be a disaster for any photographer who uses metadata for digital asset management. I’m certainly not going to entrust my 24,000 photos to the current beta – at least not until Microsoft have identified and corrected this particular bug.

Apart from real showstoppers such as these, there are the usual raft of niggles, which while they may be somewhat irritating, don’t cause active harm. One example I’ve got is the fact that each time I reinstall the Connector software on a client machine, the previous examples live on like ghosts in the administration console. Take a look at this to see what I mean.

Those greyed-out icons cannot be got rid of, and represent previous instances of the Connector software on client machines.

So, on we slog…