Datasheet

What Windows Home Server won’t do
By and large, WHS can do anything you would expect a server to do, and
much more. But there are a few shortcomings that you should understand
before you knock yourself silly trying to accomplish the impossible:
 Windows Home Server only supports ten users (plus the Guest
account).
You can have ten different user names on your network — and
that’s all she wrote. If you need to allow more than ten people to use your
network (remember
The Brady Bunch? I was trying to forget it, too . . .),
they’ll have to start sharing user names.
 Windows Home Server only supports ten PCs on the network. Perhaps
surprisingly, you can put two WHS servers on the same network, and you
can even stick a WHS server on a Small Business Server network. But you
can’t have more than ten PCs connected simultaneously to a single WHS
server.
 You can’t use a laptop as a Windows Home Server. That’s a real pity
because, all other things being equal, a laptop with a dead screen would
be an ideal candidate for a server.
 Only NTFS-formatted drives get backed up. Chances are good that all
of your network’s hard drives use the newer NTFS file system, instead of
the old Windows 98-and-earlier FAT. Windows Home Server won’t even try
to back up a non-NTFS drive, so if you have a USB “thumb” drive that’s
formatted with FAT, it won’t make the cut. You have to format your
thumb drive with NTFS first. (For details, consult your thumb drive
manufacturer’s Web site.)
 Windows Home Server won’t back up laptops running on battery
power.
Windows Home Server’s automatic backup will back up any
Windows XP or Vista computer, but it won’t back up a laptop unless the
laptop’s plugged into the wall. That makes sense: Backups can draw a lot
of power, and the last thing you need is to have your laptop’s battery die
in the middle of a backup.
 WHS won’t give the full health report on a computer running Windows
XP.
When WHS reports on computers attached to the network, it only
shows the backup status of Windows XP machines; there’s no attempt to
show the status of updates or other indicators from the Windows Security
Center. By contrast, Windows Vista machines report whether the firewall
is enabled, whether the antivirus software is up to date and working, and
whether Windows Update is set to update Windows automatically.
 Remote access to a computer doesn’t work with certain versions of
Windows.
If you want to run WHS’s Remote Access to reach into your net-
work from the Internet and run one of the computers on your home (or
small office) network, the computer that’s being suborned — the one that
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Part I: Getting Windows Home Server to Serve
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