The fine people over at homeserverland.com have posted an interview they did with me a couple of weeks ago. In this interview I give some insight on what drives me as a programmer to develop add-ins for the Windows Home Server platform.
Read the interview here.
If you own a Home Server or plan to buy/build one I can only recommend to visit HomeServerLand. They have a lot of information on WHS (great articles, forums, downloads) and the site is constantly evolving.
Note: This how-to is intended for people who know what FireFly Media Server is. If you don’t but want to read more about it, please see this tutorial on installing it on Windows Home Server. After that come back here to learn how to obtain the latest version of FireFly.
If you are an owner of an HP MediaSmart EX4xx Home Server then you’re lucky: These machines come with FireFly preinstalled and HP has already made updates available to keep your servers up to date. However, if you bought a Windows Home Server from a different manufacturer (or you are the manufacturer yourself) you may already have installed the ‘latest’ freely available version of FireFly Media Server or are maybe planning to do so.
While browsing the download section over at fireflymediaserver.org I was a little shocked to see that the latest stable version svn-1586 and the latest unstable nightly build svn-1696 both date back to 2007.
I’ve been running svn-1696 for quite some time now. A couple of days ago I recognized that whenever the FireFly service was scanning my server for new .mp3s it crashed after about 1 or 2 minutes. It was then when I went on my mission to find a somewhat more recent version of FireFly Media Server.
I knew that HP are offering a software update (version 2.5) for their MediaSmart servers, so I downloaded it from here (if this link does not work for you check this MediaSmart wiki page for the latest download URL). After downloading the file do my desktop I right-clicked it and selected ‘Create shortcut’. Now I right-clicked the newly created shortcut and selected ‘Properties’. The next step was to enter /a at the end of the ‘Target’ field:
After clicking OK I double clicked the shortcut. This launched the InstallShield Wizard which – instead of installing the software – asked me where to unpack the software package (screenshot is in german):
So I entered c:\unpacked and clicked ‘Installieren’ (= Install). Note: This will NOT install the software but really only will unpack the software package.
After the InstallShield wizard was done I opened Windows Explorer and navigated to C:\unpacked\folders\HPMSS-2.5\[PROGRAM_FILES]\Hewlett-Packard\HP MediaSmart Server\infrastructure where I found the Firefly Meda Server.exe I was looking for. Checking out the file’s properties I discovered that it was built around September, 19 2008:
I followed this tutorial on how to install it and am now running FireFly svn-1737. Thank you HP 
I have updated the Update History AddIn to version 0.2.1 Beta. This release fixes an issue where the Windows Home Server console could crash when the addin was trying to access the system’s update history. A small UI glitch has also been fixed: In the initial release (0.2.0 Beta) the column headers were labelled in german, even on non-german WHS systems.
Download Update History AddIn 0.2.1 Beta.
Have a lot of fun with this release. Feedback is welcome via Email.
This new release of the Advanced Admin Console AddIn for Windows Home Server is now fully compatible with Internet Explorer 8 (previous versions were not). In order to achieve compatibility with IE8 some fundamental changes have been implemented under the hood. As a result, the Workgroup item is no longer available. To compensate this, access to the recycle bin has been added. There’s also a new “Show Desktop” button, which when clicked launches a full Windows Desktop session. Make sure to logoff from the server when using this. You can either logoff from the WHS console or the start menu.
Another new feature is the integration of Windows Search. I consider this feature experimental. Please feel free to provide feedback on Windows Search integration in AAC.
Here’s a screenshot of AAC 0.5.0 running on Windows Home Server (Power Pack 2) with Internet Explorer 8 installed:
This version has been thoroughly tested on Windows Home Server (RTM, PP1, PP2, IE6, IE7, IE8).
Download Advanced Admin Console AddIn Version 0.5.0 Beta.
CRC-32 52180D53
MD5 F2170EFD359C106A169862F3B68F0B4B
SHA1 49376A6DD5256B2AD3AFCF59899341B6A6104206
Important: Before installing the new release, please UNINSTALL any previous version!
Feedback is welcome via Email, at the WeGotServed-Forums (english) or Home-Server-Forum (german).
As posted earlier this week, after installation of Internet Explorer 8 on Windows Home Server most of the functionality in the Advanced Admin Console AddIn is broken. If you have already IE8 installed on your WHS and want to uninstall it from within the Home Server Console by using AAC to get to the control panel then you’re stuck: AAC cannot take you there anymore, because IE8 prevents AAC from displaying the control panel (well, this is a little oversimplification – I will go into the technical details of the problem in another post soon).
You still have at least two options if you want to uninstall IE8:
Open a command prompt from within the Advanced Admin Console, then enter
RunDll32.exe shell32.dll,Control_RunDLL appwiz.cpl,,0
This will open the Add/Remove Programs control panel applet. There you can uninstall all IE8 updates (if any) and IE8 itself.
OR
follow Philip Churchills great walkthrough on mswhs.com. This guide will not only explain how to uninstall IE8 but also how to permanently prevent it from being installed automatically again.
Andreas M.
Internet Explorer 8 is currently being pushed to Windows Home Servers around the world. Unfortunately Advanced Admin Console will no longer work when IE8 is installed. I’m 99.9% sure that this is a bug in IE8 and I’ve already spent a lot of time to find a workaround to the problem. However, it seems there’s no way to make it work.
I have updated the Advanced Admin Console addin to version 0.4.4 0.4.5 Beta. With the new version installed, the Home Server Console will no longer crash when you click on an administrative item in Advanced Admin Console. Instead, a message will be displayed when IE8 or higher is detected.
To make it clear:
PLEASE DO NOT INSTALL Internet Explorer 8 on your Windows Home Server if you plan to use Advanced Admin Console.
Download Advanced Admin Console AddIn Version 0.4.4 0.4.5 Beta.
UPDATE: I’ve just released version 0.4.5 Beta. Version 0.4.4 did not display the IE8 incompatibility message in the correct language.
CRC-32 EC6A053D
MD5 35967DAC1942451596DB337F250EA30E
SHA1 4EDB92357FD5DE4EEBD6C0A92B4D8EAE96DB150B
Important: Before installing the new release, please UNINSTALL any previous version!
Feedback is welcome via Email, at the WeGotServed-Forums (english) or Home-Server-Forum (german).
This addin displays the complete system update history so that Windows Home Server owners can make sure their machine is fully patched and up to date.
This is what it looks like:
Updates can be listed in groups (grouped by installation date). The details panel shows descriptive information on the update selected in the list. For updates that contain a Microsoft Knowledgebase article id in their title a direct link to the respective article is provided.
You can review the Windows Update log file and the system event log from the toolbar. So in case an update installation failed you can easily access the logs to find out the reason for the failure.
Download Update History AddIn 0.2.0 Beta.
Have a lot of fun with this release. Feedback is welcome via Email.
As of January 2009 patch tuesday (27th), Microsoft finally started pushing the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 via Windows Update.
The package itsef has been around for some time but had to be deployed manually to end user machines/servers. It’s good to see that Microsoft is now automatically deploying it via Windows Update to every supported platform (Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008, Windows Home Server) so that developers can make use of it without having to deploy it along with their applications.
So for new releases of my addins, the system requirements will read “Windows Home Server with all high-priority updates installed”.
Here’s a screenshot from the Microsoft Update Catalog:
If you want to give your Windows Home Server’s home page some personal touch, you can try changing the image files under c:\Inetpub (at your own risk, of course).
For example, I changed the file c:\Inetpub\home\images\i_landingpage_main.png so that it shows a picture of my Fujitsu-Siemens SCALEO Home Server.
Before:
After:
If you’re also a SCALEO home server user and want to use the same picture on your server’s home page, just download i_landingpage_main.png and put it in your server’s c:\Inetpub\home\images folder.
Instead of fiddling around in the c:\inetpub folder, you can simply use Andrew Grant’s WHIIST AddIn to change the picture.
When I started putting together my Windows Live Space keinplatz.spaces.live.com about a year ago I had no idea how long it would live. Since the Advanced Admin Console AddIn for Windows Home Server seems to be somewhat popular around Home Server owners, I have decided to launch this website dedicated to Windows Home Server AddIn development. All content and downloads have been moved over to this site, so please update your bookmarks, resubscribe to my RSS feed because some new and interesting stuff is coming up during the next couple of weeks.
I’m currently busy developing a new addin for Windows Home Server, but it’s still a little too early to talk publicly about it. I’m planning to give out a first beta preview version of it to a private group of testers. If you happen to have a large collection of cd/dvd disc image files (like .iso-images) stored on your Home Server I’d really appreciate if you would join the beta and give valuable feedback to influence further development.
Right now the software isn’t ready yet, but when the time comes I’ll be posting a call for beta testers here so stay tuned.
Andreas M.
