This is an ASUS TS Mini. It's a Windows home server and it is a flavor of
Windows home server that is custom from ASUS. I have done an unboxing video on
it already and I also did an video an un video a video where I show how to
upgrade the hard drive. So, I've I've installed an additional 500 gig hard
drive. There's one 500 gig included. And remember too, you can also use all of
the expansion ports on the back, including six USB and two E SATA 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 going to need. First of all, we've got a quick start guide.
Then, we have our users manual. And
then, we have three separate discs. So, the first disc we're going to use is the
software installation CD. The software installation CD, as it's probably going
to tell me in the quick start 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 quick start guide while we're working on that. So,
I'm going to throw this in the disc drive. 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 going to
press next. I'm going to 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 server. I guess I better turn it on.
The lights on on the top. That's a good sign. All right. So, let's have a quick
look at the quick start guide while that
is doing its thing. So, the first step in the quick start
guide is probably something along these lines. Oh, I see. Setting up your TS
Mini. Aha. See, we missed this important step. Turning it on. Aha. But but I've
managed to do this. So, I've got it connected uh to a power plug as well as
by Ethernet cable to a gigabit switch. It's pretty important to use gigabit
with home server cuz it'll work with 1000, 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.
Okay. So installing the software on your computer. Yes, that was the uh 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 going to go ahead and go to find my home server manually.
And the home server name should be Let
me see if they're going to tell me what the home server name is going to be.
H.
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, we'll 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 like from a disc on a
custom PC, then you'll know what the name of the home server is. But uh 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, bring up the login window, and enter the administrator password. Okay,
I don't know what the admin password 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 the uh find it manually
option and it turned out that was the name. So I have I guess I've hacked my
TS Mini home server here. So now it's going ahead and installing
the Windows home server connector software. Uh it should be noted it
doesn't actually install it from the disc. What it does is the disc just
tells your computer how to look for a 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 uh you can
choose here ah 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. Uh the
password. Now, something you should be aware of is that the password, here we
go, must contain characters of at least three of the following sets: uppercase,
lowercase, numbers, and symbols. So, I'm
going to go ahead and type a password. And I'm not going to 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, but I'm going to turn off the
camera for now. Okay, well that took about 3 minutes. That's not so bad.
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. Sorry about that.
Sure if I typed it right, cuz 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 cuz uh I
realized that it was trying to download updates and I did not have a uh 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 uh to reoptain if
you lost it. And then one of the other hints that I thought was pretty helpful
was uh 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.
H 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 gray, although that's not entirely correct because it
is healthy or not. No, 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. Customize server settings. Okay.
I'm going to show you how to do all this. So, forget this. All right. So,
computers and backup. 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 backups. 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. Okay. I'm going to go ahead and
add a user account. So, user account. First name is going to be Lionus.
Okay. Last name is optional. My login name is
going to be Lionus. Now, if I enable 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
uh we can test it later. So, we can uh 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, 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. The network is critical because I do not have
antivirus software installed on my on KPC which I don't. So thank you for
letting me know that. So this has been a basic setup guide um shared folders.
Let's just stop it there and then I'll cover some
of the other features in separate