Windows Home server CAL

Howski · 27 Jun 2008 at 15:30

Hi,

does anyone one know if the CALs attached to the Windows home server actually means? Does it mena you can have 10 installs of the client SW or does it mean you can only have 10 devices acessing it? If I have a home network ith more then 10 devices and plug in a home server will I have difficulty?
Cheers
-Howard.

VeNT · 27 Jun 2008 at 16:14

you can have 10 users or devices but no more iirc, its basicaly a edited ver of windows small bussiness server for servers (or somthing like that) with a 10 cal limit rather than 15.
if you've more than 10 users or PCs then maybe look at SBS

Howski · 27 Jun 2008 at 16:57

you can have 10 users or devices but no more iirc

Yea thats the bit we are trying to work out. We were having a play with one of ours today in work and discussing how good/bad it is.

The counter point to buying one was made (by myself) that for pretty much everything your better off getting a cheap desktop with RAID and running XP Pro. The biggest counter argument was that you can only have 10 (IIRC) Units connected but we were not sure how the Home Server CALs worked. Is it 10 connected units or what. For instance (although I know this is an extreme example) If you had 10 PCs on a network with the client SW and set up on the HS and you tried to connect to stream media from an Xbox 360 what would happen. Is it just 10 units in the PC list on the HS that can be listed but more can access the share using user account like "Guest" or what?

I'm pretty unimpressed with the OS TBH - great idea poor implementation.

-Howard

VeNT · 27 Jun 2008 at 19:05

dunno, I've been using it since RC1 now and its nifty, the remote admin via web interface etc work well and the simple raid-ish thing is nice too
from what I've seen it only works with PCs, not media connectors (not got an xbox to test with, sorry) but for £100 its a good bit of software!

also with PP1 you've got a real backup option etc

Howski · 27 Jun 2008 at 19:52

Yea the web interface is quite nice. We were mainly on about the specific server units when we were talking about it. When your shelling out £450 for something like that I'd kinda would have expected a little more.

Tell me - as we don't get to play with these too much, have you just popped the OS on a computer? Can you set up print sharing? We were told that you can only use the USB ports for data drives - which sucks.

As for the M$ RAID thing - when they fix it it will probably be fine but why re-invent the wheel. RAID controllers are on nearly every MB and must be pretty cheap for one that does mirroring. They just made a rod for their back that back fired in a huge way with the bug.

From the back up view the consensus was a external HDD with a LAN port which would probably cost about as much as the OS ;-)

VeNT · 7 Jul 2008 at 10:34

I've not tried the print share yet but backups seem ok, its the user accounts and web access to files/PCs that was what I wanted
I dropped it on an old Poweredge 330 SC (800 MHz so below min spec but works)