HP's Windows Home Server - What A Pain in My Ass
I've been dogfooding Windows Home Server Power Pack 1 for a long time, now.
For those of you who aren't aware, it's basically a service pack for Home Server that adds a few features and fixes some bugs (like the data corruption issue). Now that PP1 is released, I figured it was time to update to the RTM build. But I couldn't because I was stupid a while ago.
I was running low on space, so I delete all of the backup files for applied hotfixes because I never uninstall them.
Except, you know, I need to uninstall the beta PP1 before I can install the RTM version.
So I'm boned.
Not to worry, I thought. I'll just back up all of my files to my workstation (like I've done many, many times before) and reinstall the server. So I started the backup. And about half way through, I realized that I didn't have enough disk space - in fact, I was short by about 720GB. I've been ripping a lot of movies and archiving some TV shows lately, so it makes sense.
I added the necessary disk space to my workstation and restarted the backup. A day later, the data was transferred. So I started the recovery procedure. For those of you who haven't done it, or don't know, HP's MediaSmart Home Server doesn't have a video card or any way to plug in a mouse or keyboard. The recovery is done from a separate workstation that finds the home server over the network (somehow) and then reinstalls Windows remotely.
So, my main workstation is Vista x86 SP1. I loaded up the recovery software, and it abruptly failed. Again, and again it failed. I rebooted the server and the workstation, and it made no difference. It just failed.
So I tried my Vista x64 SP1 laptop, and it worked on the first try... sort of.
The software found the server and uploaded the Windows image. The server rebooted, and then some more software launched on my laptop to help me configure the server. Of course, that software doesn't work on x64, and I couldn't figure out how to launch it on x86 without doing another restore... so I tried... and it failed again.
Eventually I got pissed off enough to install Vista x86 RTM in Virtual PC, and I'm restoring the server from a VM as we speak. This is such an amazing pain in the ass. I have been working on this sonovabitch since noon. That's six fucking hours. I've installed Linux twice in that time (I'll blog about that piece of shit later). I thought that it would be a good idea to get the HP server because it would be a simple appliance as opposed to a computer.
How fucking wrong was I?