ASUS TS Mini Windows Home Server WHS Basic Configuration & Setup Guide Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2011-05-08
·
1,969 words · ~9 min read
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This is an ASUS TS Mini. It's a Windows home server and it is a flavor of
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Windows home server that is custom from ASUS. I have done an unboxing video on
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it already and I also did an video an un video a video where I show how to
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upgrade the hard drive. So, I've I've installed an additional 500 gig hard
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drive. There's one 500 gig included. And remember too, you can also use all of
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the expansion ports on the back, including six USB and two E SATA to add
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additional hard drive storage to this particular unit. This series of videos
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that I'm going to be doing over the next little while is going to be about
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Windows Home Server and what makes it one of my favorite pieces of software
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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.
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Then, we have our users manual. And
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then, we have three separate discs. So, the first disc we're going to use is the
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software installation CD. The software installation CD, as it's probably going
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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
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go ahead and show you the quick start guide while we're working on that. So,
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I'm going to throw this in the disc drive. The software installation CD is
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actually an optional step, but you can use it to install the Windows home
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server software on your home computer, which will make it so that your home
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computer will be able to detect and connect to a Windows home server.
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Because remember, the TS Mini and many home servers does not have a VGA port.
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So, there is actually no way to hook up a display to it. That means that you
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rely on your network connection to the home server in order to access its
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administration options. So I'm going to go ahead run install
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and this is going to install the Windows home server connector. So I'm going to
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press next. I'm going to go ahead and zoom in so you can see some idea what
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I'm doing here. I accept the end user license agreement which I have
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thoroughly read and it is now trying to
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locate my home server. I guess I better turn it on.
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The lights on on the top. That's a good sign. All right. So, let's have a quick
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look at the quick start guide while that
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is doing its thing. So, the first step in the quick start
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guide is probably something along these lines. Oh, I see. Setting up your TS
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Mini. Aha. See, we missed this important step. Turning it on. Aha. But but I've
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managed to do this. So, I've got it connected uh to a power plug as well as
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by Ethernet cable to a gigabit switch. It's pretty important to use gigabit
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with home server cuz it'll work with 1000, but it's not going to give you a
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very satisfactory experience. And it should be noted that Windows home server
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will not run on a wireless connection for the home server. You can have
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wireless client PCs. So like that computer over there could be wireless
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but the home server must be wired.
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Okay. So installing the software on your computer. Yes, that was the uh the first
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thing I did. So I was slightly out of order. Ah so now it's uh couldn't find
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my home server because probably because I didn't have it plugged in at first. So
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I'm going to go ahead and go to find my home server manually.
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And the home server name should be Let
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me see if they're going to tell me what the home server name is going to be.
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H.
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No, no, they're not going to make it
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quite that easy for me. Okay. Well, why
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don't we try another automatic search? So, we'll go back. search again, which
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is what is recommended. Let's just follow the recommended steps and see if
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that works. If you installed Windows Home Server from like from a disc on a
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custom PC, then you'll know what the name of the home server is. But uh I
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actually don't know what the name of this one is. Okay, so number three,
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getting started. So once it detects the home server, you will bring in the
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login, bring up the login window, and enter the administrator password. Okay,
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I don't know what the admin password is for this one. Adding a hard drive. I already covered that in a separate
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edition of NCIX or rather Linus Tech Tips. Setting up user accounts. Okay, so
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that's a step that we'll get to as soon as that is done. I'm going to go ahead
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and stop the camera for now. As a bit of an aside, the second automatic search
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failed, but I typed TS Mini with no spaces into the uh find it manually
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option and it turned out that was the name. So I have I guess I've hacked my
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TS Mini home server here. So now it's going ahead and installing
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the Windows home server connector software. Uh it should be noted it
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doesn't actually install it from the disc. What it does is the disc just
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tells your computer how to look for a home server and then it downloads the
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software from the home server and installs it from there to make sure that it has the latest edition. So uh you can
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choose here ah this is this is one of the biggest features of home server
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automatic computer backup. So it gives you a couple options. Do you want to
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automatically wake up this computer to back it up? Yes, I want to make sure this computer gets backed up every day,
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even if it is in sleep or hibernate mode.
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So, I'm going to go ahead and click next a couple times and hope that it
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registers at some point.
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There we go. All right. So, the name of the home server here, we're finally
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setting it up. That didn't actually take that long. I shouldn't say finally. The
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name of the home server is going to be TS Mini. Sure, that's fine. Uh the
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password. Now, something you should be aware of is that the password, here we
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go, must contain characters of at least three of the following sets: uppercase,
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lowercase, numbers, and symbols. So, I'm
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going to go ahead and type a password. And I'm not going to show you guys this
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because it's my actual strong password.
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Okay. So, I'll go ahead. The reason it has to be a strong password is that the
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administrator account can have access to the home server from a remote location.
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So that means that it has to be a password that would be quite difficult
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to guess.
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All right, we are going to use the recommended settings to stay up to date.
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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
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camera for now. Okay, well that took about 3 minutes. That's not so bad.
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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
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password, which I need two hands for. Sorry about that.
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Sure if I typed it right, cuz it takes a little while to sign in.
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Yeah, I did not type it right. Sorry about that. Let's try that one more
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time.
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Oh, I also I added an internet connection to my switch here cuz uh I
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realized that it was trying to download updates and I did not have a uh network
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cable plugged into my router. I saw that
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there were a couple of hints that it gave you while it was installing and I
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there were a couple pretty helpful ones. Remember the password. Make sure you do
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not forget the password because it would be quite difficult to uh to reoptain if
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you lost it. And then one of the other hints that I thought was pretty helpful
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was uh this one. You can stream media to
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every room with Windows home server. So you can stream to another PC or to an
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Xbox 360.
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H okay, just a minute. Well, I guess it was installing some updates and
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restarting because now I have connected to the Windows home server console. The
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first thing that comes up is the console help. It says, "Welcome to Windows Home
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Server. Explore the Windows home server tray icon on your home computer." Okay.
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And it tells you what all of the different statuses mean. So, right now
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you can see that it is gray, although that's not entirely correct because it
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is healthy or not. No, maybe it's critical because it says it's critical
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up here. Whatever. We'll figure that out later. Okay. Add user accounts. Organize
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files and shared folders. Configure backup. Customize server settings. Okay.
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I'm going to show you how to do all this. So, forget this. All right. So,
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computers and backup. So, you can see the one computer that I have configured
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is the one that I installed the Windows home server connector software on. So,
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this one. Let's configure the backups. So, view backups.
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Right now, I don't have any. Okay.
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I wonder why I can't configure backups right now.
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That's kind of weird. Maybe we need to set up a user account first. All right.
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User account. Don't show this message again. Okay. I'm going to go ahead and
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add a user account. So, user account. First name is going to be Lionus.
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Okay. Last name is optional. My login name is
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going to be Lionus. Now, if I enable remote access, which means I can access
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all of my files from anywhere, and I can actually use remote desktop connection
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to any supported PC on my home network. So, you should only use that for people
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who you want doing those things. So, in this case, I'm going to say I don't need
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to bother with Oh, you know what? No, I should enable it because that way we can
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uh we can test it later. So, we can uh pick which of these options are allowed.
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All right. So that means I have to choose a strong password at least seven
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characters and it has to be a complex password. So three different types of
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characters. So set access to shared folders. These are all the folders that
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I will have access to besides my own personal folder. So if you have multiple
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user accounts, those will appear in there as well. You can set who has
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access to whose shared folder. So now we
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have gone ahead and created that account. So
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that's a very strange thing. The network is critical because I do not have
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antivirus software installed on my on KPC which I don't. So thank you for
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letting me know that. So this has been a basic setup guide um shared folders.
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Let's just stop it there and then I'll cover some
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of the other features in separate