Andrew Grant

I’ve been running the Windows 7 beta for around a week now and decided over the weekend that I like it enough to use in place of Vista.

When I tried to set it up with my HP MediaSmart Server though the HP installer would constantly generate a Windows error, before displaying an error message with “RegOpenKeyExW” and then exiting.

Trying the vanilla installer from a system-builder install of Windows Home Server lead to more helpful information, and a series of steps that will resolve this problem;

For anyone encountering the “RegOpenKeyExW” with the HP MediaSmart Server/Windows Home Server, and Windows 7 try the following steps;

1. Click Start button and type “Command”. When  “Command Prompt” appears in the list, right-click on it and choose “Run as Administrator”
2. Enter the following: reg delete HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\SQMClient\Windows\DisabledSessions /va /f
3. Press enter. If you receive an error you are probably not running as an administrator.
4. Close the command prompt. The Windows Home Server connector software should now install successfully.

Currently you’re Windows 7 machine will be listed as “Windows Vista”, but that’s a known issue!

Like everyone with both Windows Home Server and Windows Media Center boxes I’d pay a good chunk of cash to have both in a single box featuring shared storage, cablecard support, and a small and eco-friendly footprint. A very good chunk.

A few people have (somewhat) successfully virtualized Windows Home Server on their Windows Media Center box but while I admire their cunning there’s potentially a rather ugly problem. If the OS drive for WMC should ever fail you have a chicken-and-egg situation. No WMC = No WHS = No restore from backup.

I think a better scenario then is to have Windows Media Center running as a service on the Home Server box with all output being through one or more extenders. With a few constraints I couldn’t think of any reason why this wouldn’t work so I decided to give it a go

Note the following were required;

1. A VM package that supports USB devices and can be run as a service.
2. USB Tuners
3. Acceptance of being limited to extenders, and not being able to record protected digital content (for the same reasons you can’t record digital content with a custom-built box).

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This is a screenshot of using Live Mesh on my work machine to login to Vista (running under VMWare fusion) on my MacBook at home, which is logged into my Windows Home Server development box, which is installing a copy of Vista Home Premium under VMWare Server.

It looked neat and kind of trippy so I thought I’d post. Everything is fairly responsive too which is nice.

And yes, there is a reason for this hall-of-mirrors type madness. More later

Over the weekend I uploaded a new version of Whiist that fixes an issue with Power Pack 1 for Windows Home Server, and the remaining issue with the HP Media Smart Server.

The Power Pack 1 issue was due to the use of an undocumented (oops!) interface that was removed in PP1. Thanks to Brendan for pointing that out to me.

The HP Media Smart Server issue was caused by Whiist not preserving some HP-specific markup stored in the XML file which controls the list of website links of the public / private homepages.

The HP fix has been tested by several volunteers for a few weeks now without any sign of problems. I’ve removed the warning relating to the MSS from the Whiist homepage, however please note that Whiist still remains beta software.

Aside from these two changes, and some minor bug fixes, this release is identical to the previous 0.80 release. I know it’s been a while, but stay tuned for a proper new release soon

This week I tried installing Mac OSX 10.5 on my PC (more on this later) so I could have a play with the iPhone SDK. I’m a little underwhelmed by some of the restrictions, but there’s still a couple of ideas I’d like to prototype and see what becomes of them.

As my plan was to dual boot Vista/OSX I used GParted to shrink my main partition and create a little 20GB one for OSX. Then during the OSX install I selected this partition and formatted it with the Mac’s HFS+ filesystem.

At least that was the plan.

Somehow (and I blame the cat for distracting me) I managed to format both partitions and as a result blitzed my main Vista install. Document, settings, music, Whiist, (and most critically of all, my Counterstrike config file) all gone in the blink of an eye*. Yikes!

So, for the first time ever I found myself breaking out the Windows Home Server restore CD, placing it in my PC and rebooting with crossed fingers. And it worked, flawlessly and amazingly well. I clicked through the wizard, selected the backup from the night before, and a few hours later my PC was back in the same condition prior to my little faux pas.

Having been a Windows Home Server user since the early betas I’m well aware of its features and functions, but this is the first time I’ve ever needed it to save my bacon and it passed with flying colors. 

* Ok, I confess. I have multiple backups of these that should handle most combinations of disaster. Some of them lag by a week or so though and reinstalling and restoring everything would have been extremely tedious. And my Counterstrike file with my lovingly crafted bindings really would have been gone forever!

With a new version of Whiist available, and I supect many new owners of WHS boxes, I managed to exceed my monthly bandwidth limit which resulted in this site being offline for a few days. All should be good now. Many thanks to my hosts at AQHost for comping me extra bandwidth for the rest of the month, and Simon at dancingbear.me.uk for temporarily mirroring Whiist.

From questions I’ve seen on the Windows Home Server forums one of the most sought after customizations is changing the default image on the homepage of your server.

If you’ve tried to do this yourself you’ve probably found it isn’t very easy. You need to login via Remote Desktop, find the correct file, and then use an image editing program to paste your new image into the correct place, then resave the file.

Yeah, I never found the time to change mine either

Anyway, one of the goals of Whiist is to make managing all of the websites on your Windows Home Server a great deal easier, and to this end the latest version of Whiist (0.8) now includes a simple editor that lets you change this image.

Go to the Whiist options page using the settings button on the menu bar and you will find the option to customize your home page, along with a preview of how the page will look. In the editor select an image and use the mouse to position/zoom as desired. When you click ‘Apply’ Whiist will generate a new image for your Windows Home Server page and save it in the appropriate place.

I’m still working one a couple of “bigger” features for Whiist that I hope to have ready in the new year. I’m not quite ready to say what these are yet, but if you like blogging and photo galleries I think you’ll be happy

Merry Christmas!

Since the release of HP’s Media Smart Server I’ve had emails from several users who have encountered problems while using Whiist. While many MSS owners are using Whiist trouble-free, some have encountered problems where they are either no longer able to access websites created by the HP server, or use Remote Access.

Once person has claimed that Whiist overwrites settings required by the HP MSS – I can assure you that this is absolutely false! I very much believe that Whiist behaves as a “good citizen” in respect to Home Server;

Unless you choose to add/modify/remove a website or link, Whiist does nothing.

When you DO choose to add/modify/remove a website or link, Whiist only changes the item in question.

Whenever Whiist does create/modify/remove a website it does so via the IIS interface built into Windows Server. Whenever it changes a website link, it does so according to the specs in the Home Server SDK.

If you WERE to edit or remove a website that has been created by the HP software then I can completely see that this may cause problems. Within the next few days I’ll be releasing a version of Whiist that hides the HP entries from view so they cannot be accidentally removed or altered.

Clearly there IS a problem and for that reason I would recommend that if you are a HP Media Smart Server you proceed with caution if installing Whiist – and I would certainly recommend that you do not modify/remove any websites or links you have not created yourself.

If you have installed Whiist and are experiencing problems then I deeply apologize. please follow this link and provide as much detail as possible and I’ll endeavor to help you out;

Andrew

Brenden Grant (no relation!) has written this is the coolest Add-in for Windows Home Server that I’ve seen so far.

WebFolders4WHS allows you to choose shares on your home server and have them accessible via WebDav. Once installed you can use any program that supports WebDav to directly access the files on your Home Server. WebDav is a less well known Internet technology, but it’s an established protocol and there are a lot of programs that support it.

Windows Explorer supports WebDav so once you install WebFolders4WHS you can use Explorer to access the files on your WHS from anywhere you have an Internet connection. If you’re running Vista you can even map a share on your WHS to a drive letter and it’ll act exactly the same as any other drive. (Windows XP will let you access the files through a special link, though you can install WebDrive or NetDrive to map to a drive letter under XP).

Tres Cool!

Wow. Just. Wow. Out of all the entries submitted for Microsoft’s Code2Fame challenge, and from the three excellent finalists, Whiist managed to take first place!

So here’s how it went down;

Early on the Tuesday morning Liz and I flew to Seattle. Microsoft had paid for my flight so we cashed in some airmiles for Liz and then upgraded to first class – I felt it would help me get into a better state of mind for the competition  

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