I bought an OEM copy as soon as it came out. I re-purposed my old gaming machine platform and built it into an HTPC case using quiet fans etc. AMD 64x2 4400+, DFI RD200 MoBo, 3x Samsung 500Gb, DVDRam, 2Gb OCZ400.
I had a big fight on setup as I wanted to use the DFI hardware RAID and everytime in order to RAID5 thr 3 500Gb discs. I configured it and WHS refused to identify it on installation. If I loadad XP or Vista it would install over the top without a fight, but WHS would not see it. I had to unbundle and load the core OS as JBOD.
As many people say, good n00b friendly interface, easy setup, backup and recovery great feature as there are a lot of laptops around the hose now a days. Remote access and domain hosting very easy to setup and very valuable as a I travel a lot (Thank you slingbox as well)
JBOD and "application level software RAID" became annoying as I copied all the local content over to the duplicated folders on the server. The copy speed sucked and the number of times I had to see if the thing was still alive (I thought it had detacthed and gone to sleep) and found "storage balancing" on the bottom line began to make me frustrated. This thing has enough horsepower and the statement of MS is that it should be capable of running on older retired hardware.
Then it all went furry. I backup a Dell 1710 and 1330 as our two house machines which have important material. We needed to restore the 1330 in order to get a file that was overwritten and it failed badly. I started to look at the web and found an excellent site
this explained a lot of the issue you very concisely cover in your article. So I looked at a number of my other files as a test (170Gb of personal music uploaded through WMP) and I had added comments and rankings to them. Quite a lot of errors and bad files.
I have continued to use the system, the utility that allows you to prune it back to a single drive and de-mount the other drives works well. I dropped it to a single 500Gb and added the others to the new gaming system as a ICH-9R RAID array and copied all of the files over. It is now the default house server using VistaU64. Lets just agree is is faster, easier and more effective. It does not have the remote access and backup but that costs about £20 in software to add ?
I am disgusted by MS stance, in general I think they do a pretty good job and whilst it is easy to knock them (I was an Apple field engineer when the Mac was released and worked for Sun for 3 years) they do deserve respect and I can think of companies that do a lot worse.
So you avoid telling us. You continue to ship the thing. You don't assist your OEM (unless it was on the quiet.....) You don't offer any form of guidance. When the customer does find out he has to dig deep to find out the reality and then gets the wake up call.
I have a software package that does not work. I remember the old joke about MS taking the mickey out of GM for the slow rate of development of the motor car and then GM firing back about the BSOD issue at 90. (lets not mention the work of Mr Nader on an early example) MS just provided a swing axle operating system at this point and do deserve an attitude adjustment.
I am not saying litigation is the answer. I would like to either return the software or be given an SME S2008 licence, they offered me a home server and I don't have one that is trustworthy. If you want to regain respect in a situation like this you should support the customer and offer a positive commitment to improvement. I think a promise to provide V2, an interim "offer" of an alternative if the cutomer does want to progress it (admittedly the OEM version would probably take this but the pre-builts would have problems) would be a decent gesture.
I did recommend it to many of my friends - when will I learn.
Come on MS pull your finger out and show some respect to people who pay your wages.
OfficeMax was selling WHS with a free 500gbHD, but it looks like the issue is occurring with 2 HD setups, so that free HD would not be a wise addition to the WHS until this bug is corrected (June ?? C'mon MS !!)
Either way, WHS itself is a great idea and the software itself is what makes it powerful, but the users afflicted with this bug are suffering with no end in sight.
Great article, I'm glad I'm not alone seeing this corruption.
I commented about this corruption bug in my article I wrote a few weeks ago on eXoid.com I can't believe this wasn't caught earlier, You would think this would be a lawsuit waiting to happen.
You mean a lawsuit like hard drive manufacturers face? Computers are expected to, at some point, lose/corrupt/completely obliterate data. Users are expected to have backups. Period.
...I have yet to hit this, been running since beta.
Backup - no problems
Restore - no problems
RDP gateway/Remote - no problems
Serviing files - no problems
Copying content to the server - no problems
I never edit on the server, even before this was identified.
The fact that the WHS is being so open about this and up front about how hard it is to address is refreshing.
As to drive extender being "overly complicated." Well, it does cool things. Online, on the fly storage aggregation without having to suffer long array build times is not simple. That said, I disable all file duplication and rely on an Areca controller and RAID5 for recovery. File mirroring is a waste of space when you have RAID5 and 6 as viable options.
To be honest my biggest beef: you cannot boot a client off the restore CD if the optical drive is SATA, even if a SATA drive is plugged in and you;re booting from a PATA device it will crash. Lame.
However the painless backup/restore process is awesome.
"To be honest my biggest beef: you cannot boot a client off the restore CD if the optical drive is SATA, even if a SATA drive is plugged in and you;re booting from a PATA device it will crash. Lame."
I boot one of my client PCs with the WHS restore disk from a SATA DVD-RW with no problem.
System: LG GSA-H26N DVD-RW, Gigabyte P35-DQ6, QX9650, Vista Ultimate
I was at first very concerned about this issue. Then I came to realize that due to the nightly backup most of the files I had always kept on my W3K server so they where safe were now just as safe on my WS. The only reason in a home environment to have a file 'shared' on the server is for multi-user live access needs. I don't know of any in my environment. I keep everything on the WS and let the WHS handle my long term archive, mp3, wav, and backup needs. It does it well. I wish this bug didn't exist but I also know it will be fixed and in the meantime I'm not impacted by it.
This whole unfortunate situation with WHS reminds me a the TV advertising of Paul Masson (you know, the wine guy) a few years ago. They used to run an ad that said, "We will sell no wine before its time!" Indeed they even got none other than Orson Welles to do that TV piece. I sure wish the WHS folks at Microsoft had paid a little better attention to that ad.
Of all the shortcomings that a new software server product might encounter, data corruption is by far the worst. That type of a bug just destroys public confidence in a product, a large portion of which will likely never be fully regained. It also made a fool out of a number of computer pundits that unequivocally endorsed the WHS product.
Now just in case anyone wonders if I know what I'm talking about, I run a computer business and had planned on selling the heck out of WHS. In fact I still hope to do so. But NOT with WHS Rev.1. It is a plain fact of life that we desperately need a re-born, distinctly new version (Rev 2.0) to sell (and use) in order to overcome the terrible effects of this data corruption fiasco.
Oh, and by the way Microsoft, if you have a collective brain in your head, you darn well ought to do the right thing by offering a free upgrade to Rev.2 for anyone who bought Rev.1. At least that way the significant number of early adopters won't become a mortal enemy to WHS and kill the thing before it ever gets a chance to resurrect itself. That's just some food for thought. But you sure ought to give it some serious consideration.
I agree race conditions are pretty rough, but it feels like this is a little over-dramatic. Using the sort example is kind of a worst case scenario type thing. Generally they can be solved with some additional synchronization (and hopefully preserve performance). Lock up a resource rather than fight for it (hence the 'race' metaphor).
Since it hits so close to home with respect to the 'great new features' category of WHS I'm sure the dev responsible won't be in a great position, but playing the odds my guess is it will be handled in short order.
Patient: It hurts when I do *this*!
Doctor: Then don't do *that*.
I'll simply avoid doing incremental file saves on my WHS server until it's fixed. I will not throw out a whole basketful of good because of one bad. My experience with Microsoft goes back to Windows v1.04 (circa 1987-88), and WHS v1.0 is among the best first-generation products Microsoft has ever released.
One thing is for certain: my install of WHS v1.0 is more stable than my install of Vista Ultimate!
The design of this subsystem is typical of the Microsoft approach to design: make something supremely complex, rather than something simple and elegant. This reminds me of the Crypto file capability in NT/2000 -- I remember reading an article about it and looking at the information flow diagram and just shook my head in dismay -- it was unbelievably complex for something that was just supposed to encrypt files. And ironically, despite all that complexity, the system was almost useless -- you had to encrypt manually, so could easily forget to encrypt, and it left all filenames exposed in the clear -- the structure of a secure volume and all the names can be just as important as the content of the files themselves. And compared to a whole-volume solution, its performance was pitiful.
I have no sympathy for Microsoft in this issue. First, they clearly built something WAY too complex and risky for a new product that critically needed to be reliable. And second, they obviously completely undertested it, which is shocking and egregiously irresponsible.
Microsoft (at least used to) like to boast that it highers "super smart" people -- I actually think this has become their curse, since these near-geniuses have become inmates running the asylum, and have turned the company into their own little private puzzle-solving playground, with things like Encrypting filesystem, OLE/ActiveX, Vista (DX10, etc.), this file system extender, etc. etc. They also have WAY too much money and time on their hands -- if they assigned half the developers and half the time to their projects, I am certain the end product would be twice as good!
The solution is simple... never use software RAID. Only use RAID with a proper hardware-based solution.
Just for performance reasons alone it's a bad idea. Yeah, it seems to be practically as fast in a benchmark situation... but have a bunch of other stuff running and then see how well it does!
That's a bit backwards. The ideal solution would be to throw a software raid card in these effected systems so it has the spanning and redundancy. It's ideal instead of a hardware raid card because for a home server the hardware raid card will be mostly wasted money without performance benefit (assuming an otherwise modern system set up for home server duty).
Software raid does not significantly effect performance on a WHS candidate home server. Using today's hardware the CPU load using software raid would be about 10% if that. If you have a bunch of other stuff running it will make no difference, assuming it is reasonably home server related (a few clients' mail, DNS, proxy, etc) not trying to run video encoding jobs or game on your server.
I really like the WHS concept, and like you am sorry to see this problem tarnishing it's future.
I have been slowly working to get my current HTPC moved to WHS thanks to the WHS version of SageTV and their new (but hard to get) HD extender. I get the additional features of WHS and can move the computer from my living room to a closet and use a small, quiet extender box in my entertainment center.
But I have to agree that I'm reluctant to drop the money on an OEM copy for all the reasons you outline. I would have a multi-HDD setup and normaly do edit files on the HTPC/server, so I have no reason to jump on this bandwagon right now.
I'm hoping MS is smart enough to keep this product around, it was/is a step in the right direction but I can't support it yet until I know it's stable and safe.
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17 Comments
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Itsamuppett - Thursday, April 17, 2008 - link
So close, and yet so far.I bought an OEM copy as soon as it came out. I re-purposed my old gaming machine platform and built it into an HTPC case using quiet fans etc. AMD 64x2 4400+, DFI RD200 MoBo, 3x Samsung 500Gb, DVDRam, 2Gb OCZ400.
I had a big fight on setup as I wanted to use the DFI hardware RAID and everytime in order to RAID5 thr 3 500Gb discs. I configured it and WHS refused to identify it on installation. If I loadad XP or Vista it would install over the top without a fight, but WHS would not see it. I had to unbundle and load the core OS as JBOD.
As many people say, good n00b friendly interface, easy setup, backup and recovery great feature as there are a lot of laptops around the hose now a days. Remote access and domain hosting very easy to setup and very valuable as a I travel a lot (Thank you slingbox as well)
JBOD and "application level software RAID" became annoying as I copied all the local content over to the duplicated folders on the server. The copy speed sucked and the number of times I had to see if the thing was still alive (I thought it had detacthed and gone to sleep) and found "storage balancing" on the bottom line began to make me frustrated. This thing has enough horsepower and the statement of MS is that it should be capable of running on older retired hardware.
Then it all went furry. I backup a Dell 1710 and 1330 as our two house machines which have important material. We needed to restore the 1330 in order to get a file that was overwritten and it failed badly. I started to look at the web and found an excellent site
http://www.wegotserved.co.uk/">http://www.wegotserved.co.uk/
this explained a lot of the issue you very concisely cover in your article. So I looked at a number of my other files as a test (170Gb of personal music uploaded through WMP) and I had added comments and rankings to them. Quite a lot of errors and bad files.
I have continued to use the system, the utility that allows you to prune it back to a single drive and de-mount the other drives works well. I dropped it to a single 500Gb and added the others to the new gaming system as a ICH-9R RAID array and copied all of the files over. It is now the default house server using VistaU64. Lets just agree is is faster, easier and more effective. It does not have the remote access and backup but that costs about £20 in software to add ?
I am disgusted by MS stance, in general I think they do a pretty good job and whilst it is easy to knock them (I was an Apple field engineer when the Mac was released and worked for Sun for 3 years) they do deserve respect and I can think of companies that do a lot worse.
So you avoid telling us. You continue to ship the thing. You don't assist your OEM (unless it was on the quiet.....) You don't offer any form of guidance. When the customer does find out he has to dig deep to find out the reality and then gets the wake up call.
I have a software package that does not work. I remember the old joke about MS taking the mickey out of GM for the slow rate of development of the motor car and then GM firing back about the BSOD issue at 90. (lets not mention the work of Mr Nader on an early example) MS just provided a swing axle operating system at this point and do deserve an attitude adjustment.
I am not saying litigation is the answer. I would like to either return the software or be given an SME S2008 licence, they offered me a home server and I don't have one that is trustworthy. If you want to regain respect in a situation like this you should support the customer and offer a positive commitment to improvement. I think a promise to provide V2, an interim "offer" of an alternative if the cutomer does want to progress it (admittedly the OEM version would probably take this but the pre-builts would have problems) would be a decent gesture.
I did recommend it to many of my friends - when will I learn.
Come on MS pull your finger out and show some respect to people who pay your wages.
WT - Monday, March 17, 2008 - link
OfficeMax was selling WHS with a free 500gbHD, but it looks like the issue is occurring with 2 HD setups, so that free HD would not be a wise addition to the WHS until this bug is corrected (June ?? C'mon MS !!)Either way, WHS itself is a great idea and the software itself is what makes it powerful, but the users afflicted with this bug are suffering with no end in sight.
cbutters - Sunday, March 16, 2008 - link
Great article, I'm glad I'm not alone seeing this corruption.I commented about this corruption bug in my article I wrote a few weeks ago on eXoid.com I can't believe this wasn't caught earlier, You would think this would be a lawsuit waiting to happen.
ajdavis - Sunday, March 16, 2008 - link
You mean a lawsuit like hard drive manufacturers face? Computers are expected to, at some point, lose/corrupt/completely obliterate data. Users are expected to have backups. Period.FireTech - Sunday, March 16, 2008 - link
Very nice article Ryan, which I'm sure now makes the situation seem a lot less 'scary' for the majority of current WHS users.ianken - Friday, March 14, 2008 - link
...I have yet to hit this, been running since beta.Backup - no problems
Restore - no problems
RDP gateway/Remote - no problems
Serviing files - no problems
Copying content to the server - no problems
I never edit on the server, even before this was identified.
The fact that the WHS is being so open about this and up front about how hard it is to address is refreshing.
As to drive extender being "overly complicated." Well, it does cool things. Online, on the fly storage aggregation without having to suffer long array build times is not simple. That said, I disable all file duplication and rely on an Areca controller and RAID5 for recovery. File mirroring is a waste of space when you have RAID5 and 6 as viable options.
To be honest my biggest beef: you cannot boot a client off the restore CD if the optical drive is SATA, even if a SATA drive is plugged in and you;re booting from a PATA device it will crash. Lame.
However the painless backup/restore process is awesome.
Dsjonz - Sunday, March 16, 2008 - link
My experience matches yours, except for this:"To be honest my biggest beef: you cannot boot a client off the restore CD if the optical drive is SATA, even if a SATA drive is plugged in and you;re booting from a PATA device it will crash. Lame."
I boot one of my client PCs with the WHS restore disk from a SATA DVD-RW with no problem.
System: LG GSA-H26N DVD-RW, Gigabyte P35-DQ6, QX9650, Vista Ultimate
gpaul - Saturday, March 15, 2008 - link
I was at first very concerned about this issue. Then I came to realize that due to the nightly backup most of the files I had always kept on my W3K server so they where safe were now just as safe on my WS. The only reason in a home environment to have a file 'shared' on the server is for multi-user live access needs. I don't know of any in my environment. I keep everything on the WS and let the WHS handle my long term archive, mp3, wav, and backup needs. It does it well. I wish this bug didn't exist but I also know it will be fixed and in the meantime I'm not impacted by it.TheBeagle - Friday, March 14, 2008 - link
This whole unfortunate situation with WHS reminds me a the TV advertising of Paul Masson (you know, the wine guy) a few years ago. They used to run an ad that said, "We will sell no wine before its time!" Indeed they even got none other than Orson Welles to do that TV piece. I sure wish the WHS folks at Microsoft had paid a little better attention to that ad.Of all the shortcomings that a new software server product might encounter, data corruption is by far the worst. That type of a bug just destroys public confidence in a product, a large portion of which will likely never be fully regained. It also made a fool out of a number of computer pundits that unequivocally endorsed the WHS product.
Now just in case anyone wonders if I know what I'm talking about, I run a computer business and had planned on selling the heck out of WHS. In fact I still hope to do so. But NOT with WHS Rev.1. It is a plain fact of life that we desperately need a re-born, distinctly new version (Rev 2.0) to sell (and use) in order to overcome the terrible effects of this data corruption fiasco.
Oh, and by the way Microsoft, if you have a collective brain in your head, you darn well ought to do the right thing by offering a free upgrade to Rev.2 for anyone who bought Rev.1. At least that way the significant number of early adopters won't become a mortal enemy to WHS and kill the thing before it ever gets a chance to resurrect itself. That's just some food for thought. But you sure ought to give it some serious consideration.
Ares2600 - Friday, March 14, 2008 - link
I agree race conditions are pretty rough, but it feels like this is a little over-dramatic. Using the sort example is kind of a worst case scenario type thing. Generally they can be solved with some additional synchronization (and hopefully preserve performance). Lock up a resource rather than fight for it (hence the 'race' metaphor).Since it hits so close to home with respect to the 'great new features' category of WHS I'm sure the dev responsible won't be in a great position, but playing the odds my guess is it will be handled in short order.
Dsjonz - Friday, March 14, 2008 - link
Patient: It hurts when I do *this*!Doctor: Then don't do *that*.
I'll simply avoid doing incremental file saves on my WHS server until it's fixed. I will not throw out a whole basketful of good because of one bad. My experience with Microsoft goes back to Windows v1.04 (circa 1987-88), and WHS v1.0 is among the best first-generation products Microsoft has ever released.
One thing is for certain: my install of WHS v1.0 is more stable than my install of Vista Ultimate!
androticus - Friday, March 14, 2008 - link
The design of this subsystem is typical of the Microsoft approach to design: make something supremely complex, rather than something simple and elegant. This reminds me of the Crypto file capability in NT/2000 -- I remember reading an article about it and looking at the information flow diagram and just shook my head in dismay -- it was unbelievably complex for something that was just supposed to encrypt files. And ironically, despite all that complexity, the system was almost useless -- you had to encrypt manually, so could easily forget to encrypt, and it left all filenames exposed in the clear -- the structure of a secure volume and all the names can be just as important as the content of the files themselves. And compared to a whole-volume solution, its performance was pitiful.I have no sympathy for Microsoft in this issue. First, they clearly built something WAY too complex and risky for a new product that critically needed to be reliable. And second, they obviously completely undertested it, which is shocking and egregiously irresponsible.
Microsoft (at least used to) like to boast that it highers "super smart" people -- I actually think this has become their curse, since these near-geniuses have become inmates running the asylum, and have turned the company into their own little private puzzle-solving playground, with things like Encrypting filesystem, OLE/ActiveX, Vista (DX10, etc.), this file system extender, etc. etc. They also have WAY too much money and time on their hands -- if they assigned half the developers and half the time to their projects, I am certain the end product would be twice as good!
petersterncan - Friday, March 14, 2008 - link
The solution is simple... never use software RAID. Only use RAID with a proper hardware-based solution.Just for performance reasons alone it's a bad idea. Yeah, it seems to be practically as fast in a benchmark situation... but have a bunch of other stuff running and then see how well it does!
mindless1 - Saturday, March 15, 2008 - link
That's a bit backwards. The ideal solution would be to throw a software raid card in these effected systems so it has the spanning and redundancy. It's ideal instead of a hardware raid card because for a home server the hardware raid card will be mostly wasted money without performance benefit (assuming an otherwise modern system set up for home server duty).Software raid does not significantly effect performance on a WHS candidate home server. Using today's hardware the CPU load using software raid would be about 10% if that. If you have a bunch of other stuff running it will make no difference, assuming it is reasonably home server related (a few clients' mail, DNS, proxy, etc) not trying to run video encoding jobs or game on your server.
beoba - Friday, March 14, 2008 - link
This isn't even software RAID, it's above the level of the filesystem, while software RAID would be below it.Linux example:
[filesystem/partition]
[kernel + software raid]
[physical drives]
WHS:
[hard drive spanning software]
[filesystems]
[kernel]
[physical drives]
djc208 - Friday, March 14, 2008 - link
I really like the WHS concept, and like you am sorry to see this problem tarnishing it's future.I have been slowly working to get my current HTPC moved to WHS thanks to the WHS version of SageTV and their new (but hard to get) HD extender. I get the additional features of WHS and can move the computer from my living room to a closet and use a small, quiet extender box in my entertainment center.
But I have to agree that I'm reluctant to drop the money on an OEM copy for all the reasons you outline. I would have a multi-HDD setup and normaly do edit files on the HTPC/server, so I have no reason to jump on this bandwagon right now.
I'm hoping MS is smart enough to keep this product around, it was/is a step in the right direction but I can't support it yet until I know it's stable and safe.
Desslok - Thursday, March 13, 2008 - link
Thanks for the update.