I’ve been waiting for a year now for this generation to come out from HP and bought immediately. I’m a software tester by profession, have a couple of pcs (XP and Vista) and a Mac. I was interested in the usual reasons for purchasing the device.
Generally as a unified file server I’m satisfied and there are so many glowing comments elsewhere I won’t belabor them. Three stars given is three stars earned. I have a coworker without some of the particular hurdles I overcame and he’s much more enthusiastic than I.
Some gotchas I’ve run into, for consideration by others:
1. If one is a Verizon FIOS home service user, life becomes quite complicated with the device. Do some web searches for FIOS and WHS and you’ll see the pain. It’s not the WHS’s fault – Verizon does not permit a static IP and a server of any kind violates their terms of service. It was easier with their old router apparantly but as a newer subscriber to FIOS, I can say that their newer router is quite difficult – forget the autoconfig. It actually clamps down on most traffic such that one needs to do some port forwarding alchemy to get it to work. In my case, it was not simply forwarding port 80. That was recognized and prohibited. I needed to invoke one of their gaming rules built in to the router software, which did the same forwarding. But since it was their canned version it was allowed. So an addition of the port is required in the URL, rendering the gui pretty useless. I get around it with bookmarks but it defeats the purpose of the family using the photo viewing links. Again not the WHS’s fault, but for folks having or considering switching to FIOS (with which I’m otherwise satisfied) it is a consideration.
I should note that my previous service, Comcast and router (Linksys WRT300N) didn’t present these problems. It’s only since I switched to FIOS – and while I have heartfelt differences with their denial of the static IP in their EULA (how come I can game all day long streaming traffic, but accessing a file or photo is forbidden) those are the rules I signed for.
2. HP tech support has ranged from really good (call number one ) to usually marginal or abysmal (they’ve actually put me on hold to look up what the photo viewer was before they could help me). Tip – call during standard business hours only, East Coast time. Don’t bother otherwise. When you do call them, the recording says to interrupt it as you navigate through the menu. Don’t do it. Wait until it stops ’speaking’ and then vocalize your choice.
3. The Photo Viewer and Photo Uploader are closely linked. Actually if you check the Help, you’ll see that almost all the Photo Viewer pages are actually for the Photo Uploader. It’s implied that once one’s photos are on the server the Photo Viewer can be used to view them. That’s not true – it’s actually a link to one’s online photos. So for example if you’ve used the Photo Uploader to put your photos into your Flickr album, then the Photo Viewer can be used to point to them. (Personally I would just ’share’ the album from the online site and be done with it). Those that are on your WHS are only viewable through the media browser (music and photo streamer) which has a pretty weak interface for organization and such. I haven’t seen that albums are even possible – they may be but I sort of dropped the stick and walked away on that one.
4. Mac support works as advertised for samba based file access. But a real caveat is that the Time Machine backups are partial in that one does not have the ability to do a full restore as one does on a PC. Having bought Leopard in part because of the Time Machine utility (which is really great), I suggest a couple of hundred dollars spent on an external hard drive, which will allow a full restore, will be a good investment should it become necessary. It’s noted elsewhere but worth repeating that the media aggregator is also pc only. Having my iTunes library hosted on a Mac made a manual file copy necessary, with manual updates subsequently forever.
5. Even with the new version, shipping with the 2gb of ram everyone else upgraded the first version to and the faster processor, it’s not real fast to interact with. File management is fine but accessing and working with the console is slower than it should be. As essentially an all in one pc with greatly expandable storage, replacing components will be interesting also.
6. Add ins. There’s a great community of add ins out there. Beware though that I have noted some will not play nicely with this newest generation. Since WHS doesn’t support UPS monitoring software (that is to say the use of a UPS is fine, but HP officially does not support any type of software that comes with them to monitor the UPS battery health and do controlled shut downs). I tried an Add In that did, and bricked the unit. Had to do a manual restart and uninstall.
I would like to say, great site. Im not sure if it has been talked about, however when using Safari I can never get the entire blog to load without refreshing alot of times. Maybe just my router. Appreciate your work
What in the world? I was searching for modern warfare 2 and I ended up here. lol What a coincidence. Good read. Thank you.