installing windows home server badly

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If you’ve been following my tweets then you’ll have noticed that my copy of Windows Home Server turned up. Last night I got a chance to install it. It’s the OEM version for system builders, so comes with 3 CD’s and 1 DVD.

The install process is straight forward and takes about an hour, there’s nothing tricky or no prerequisites before the install. However, I’m on install number 6, yep 6, there seems to be 1 or 2 small problems which stop the full install.

The first problem I had was it couldn’t see the second 120gb HD therefore only had 80gb of HD space. The second install worked fine and I connected the sever up to my main machine via the console and was able to setup the backups etc.

But disaster, in the morning the server wasn’t connected to the console, it had gone red and the server refused to connect to the network at an IP layer. I couldn’t ping the box or anything else, but a check of the ARP cache showed the mac addresses of the IP addresses I’d been trying to ping. SO for some strange reason it had fallen off the network and refused to get back on.

Whilst rebooting the server to bring the changed network settings in clean it lost my profile and had to install a temp version, yet another bad sign.

So I went for yet another clean install which failed again as it failed to find the second HD again. So I’ve taken the side off and re-seated the HD’s and some of the other connections to see if that makes a difference.

I’ve done a short video with a few more bit’s of background in it.

Video thumbnail. Click to play
Click To Play

Talking of the start..ray guns!

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..looks like the start of the ray gun..

the Department of Defense’s Active Denial System, which is designed to disable hostile individuals with nonlethal force. The system, jointly developed with Raytheon, uses a focused microwave beam to rapidly heat the surface of the skin, causing pain that induces targeted individuals to seek cover. Apparently, development has gone well, because the system has made it out of the labs and into the hands of the Raytheon marketing department—they’ve termed it Silent Guardian™.

Doesn’t sounds too practical right now but I’m sure we’ll see it shrink soon enough…[via]

The start of the end for the Record Industry

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According to reports, Madonna has signed a $120million deal with L.A. based concert promotion firm Live Nation to distribute three studio albums, promote concert tours, sell merchandise and license Madonna’s name.

Whilst the deal differs from Nine Inch Nails in that Madonna is not offering direct-to-public albums, Live Nation isn’t a record company. The deal shows that even for a world famous act, a record company is no longer required in the days of digital downloads and P2P music sharing.

The only real question now is how fast will the music industry model come tumbling down. When Radiohead led the way in offering their music directly to fans many predicted that the move was the beginning of the end; Madonna may well be the tipping point from where we will now see a flood of recording artists dumping record labels and where todays model will shortly become a footnote in Wikipedia.

Great news for the consumer, I wonder what it’ll mean for the RIAA when they have no record industry to ‘protect’. I think this is all very interesting and great to see people listening to what consumers want. with iTunes and Amazon selling DRM music I’m sure music will become more popular as a result and there will be money to be made for sure, but in a fair and just way for all, the consumer and the artist.

Jamie Thomas isn’t the reason why CD sales have slumped, let’s be real about this.

The rest of the story is here