Aurora is a new golden dawn for Windows servers

This version of Windows Home Server is very good

a href="http://www.golden-dawn.com/" Thanksc /a

Is vail a Microsoft(Vole) Fail ... sure sound so to me...

"Windows server has far fewer vulnerabilities than Linux"

Citation needed.

"- that are on average patched much faster - and are in general released on a monthly schedule."

Monthly schedule? How quaint! "Excuse me, Mr Cracker! Would you mind waiting a few weeks while Mr Microsoft rolls a few patches, thanks!" Just like the Patch Tuesday thing, too. And how many vulnerabilities have Microsoft been told about but not bothered to fix? What, you don't know?

"so it can compete against the Linux thin client/server offerings (point of sale systems, etc.)."

Pretty much no one in small businesses chooses to use Linux - it is much harder to get support, much harder and more expensive to administer - and then there is the ongoing problem that Linux has so many more (constantly released) security vulnerabilities to keep patched than Windows server.

Windows server has far fewer vulnerabilities than Linux - that are on average patched much faster - and are in general released on a monthly schedule.

That connects to my router. I see some of these exist, are they any good?

Best trolls ever! Kudos for working the OS/2 bit in, in particular.

@Malcolm: can't argue with your convenience, and won't.

But I never trust any HD for permanence, only somewhat when multiple. Seems DVDs are the best choice. And for both, multiple site storage.

I looked into somewhat the same problem -- who hasn't lately? -- and my choice went toward FreeNAS, seems to provide nearly all that you list, can be flung into almost any available box, and has a rather nice web-based setup.

But I re-evaluated *needs* with low-power as key. Perhaps your server has no constant purpose and can power-on by schedule; mine is at least always torrenting and recording audio streams, besides browsing and text editing.

So I chose an antique IBM 300PL with OS/2. Not a bit of down time in 9 months except for power outages or to fiddle with hardware (only 44 days longest stretch, hardly a record for OS/2). And an FTP server really is simple yet powerful,allows use of Konqueror from a Linux box for GUI convenience at the backup end.

I'd say my solution is effectively equal to yours -- at least for the parts that I care about. Doesn't require any
brilliance -- or expense -- just to look into quite viable alternatives outside of the M$ straitjacket.

Thanks for your response.

I have no connection with MS or any PR firms.

I was looking for a low power consumption 'always on' box primarily to backup my irreplaceable digital photos and to share media to various computers/consoles and to run the Squeezebox server so I purchased a Tranquil PC home server about 18 months ago.

I particularly wanted a device that would with hard disk redundancy that allowed me to add drives on an ad-hoc basis rather than a traditional mirrored RAID array needing identical drives. The only other option I was aware of at the time was the Drobo, but by the time you added Droboshare to attach it to the network it became rather pricey and (at the time) didn't permit arbitrary applications to be run - despite being linux based.

I wasn't necessarily expecting WHS to be a plug'n'play device, but it pretty much was. Login credentials are inherited from the attached computers (admittedly all run Windows) so setting up personal and public shares were trivially easy. Automated backup is similarly easy - power management integration is included so computers wake up at a scheduled time, back up and shut down again. And it's image based to in a worst case scenario (or if, like me, you've were playing with the Win7 beta) you shove in a bootable CD and reimage the computer from whichever backup you fancy. Or if you just wanted to recover a file the backup can be attached as a virtual drive from which you can drag and drop in Explorer.

I'm a software developer by trade and spend significant chunks of my days diagnosing obscure problems caused by complex corporate network configurations, so I probably could have built and configured all of the above from scratch using a other tools or devices, but I'd rather spend my evenings doing things that don't feel like work. WHS provides me with everything I want with minimal configuration and practically zero maintenance cost, which I consider 'brilliant' enough.

Why dont these Linux trolls ever go to Linux forums and articles to shower praises for their operating system and stop their seek and destroy attitude against people who simply say that some Microsoft Products are great and simply work. I mean, I like Linux and use but not for streaming my media at home to my XBox and PS3 and 3 PCs, backing up all these PCs automatically, hooking up to my IP camera and being automatically notified by email or Twitter when something in my home network is not halaal anymore. All these benefits with zero administration.

"OS/2 Warp 4.5 (codename "Aurora") was released in 1999, as a server release. It featured a bootable install CD, a new 32-bit TCP/IP stack, a journaling file system (JFS), and a logical volume manager."

http://www.os2bbs.com/OS2News/OS2Warp.html

In order to evaluate your frankness, please disclose your relationships, if any, to M$ or PR firms.

And to evaluate your use of "brilliant", please disclose your qualifications in this area.

Because since learning how to set up an FTP server (text based, at that), I've been a lot less impressed with the capabilities you list. They're actually simple (though a GUI and some automation is worthwhile) and have been possible since, oh, mid 90s, for when the hardware became common at home prices.

It's just that M$ makes everything *look* difficult to justify their prices.

The current version of Windows Home Server is a frankly brilliant piece of software. It's easy to set up, and requires literally no further intervention (unless you want to add new features of course). Mine regularly backs up 4 computers (including mirroring irreplaceable files to Amazon's cloud storage) and serves my music, photos and the odd video to everything on the network.

While I'm sure these tasks can be achieved by other means, WHS is, to all intents and purposes, a maintenance-free appliance with the flexibility of a full server. If these attributes can be carried across to 'Vail' and 'Aurora' they should have a massive success on their hands.

@Richard: There was a (rare) data corruption bug in the initial release of WHS, but that was fixed 18 months ago: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/946676/en-us

...so it can compete against the Linux thin client/server offerings (point of sale systems, etc.).

Unlike those systems, would this Aurora server have to be periodically rebooted like other Windows servers?.

Didn't their Windows home server product also lose data?