WHS: Its Ali-i-i-i-v-e!

I've been ignoring the HP MSS for about a week now.

It does some of what its been promised to do, that is to backup my MS Outlook .PST mail files and ensure I don't loose them.

The server now also contains all my multimedia files and such plus a backup of installation packages that I've collected over the years from SimTel and so on. Yeah, it doesn't make sense to have archives of different versioned software but just like sifting through your music collections (is it iTunes or MediaMonkey or The Godfather or ...) its a tedious task to weed out through the junk. I may just end up deleting it all and refreshing someday. But not today.

Anyway, here I am wondering how its been doing the past few days after the PRE-PP1 and suddenly -

And on the other Windows XP client -

So hey, whats going on here? Thats never happened before (it probably should have) if it were working correctly, but still....

I rushed over to the net and poked around. Aha! Seems to be that today was the official "D-day" for PP1 after all. Thats "D" as in deploy.

The update console confirms that my system is up-to-date. Nice. Thats good, what us beta-users are probably wondering is how is that going to affect my beta-patched HP MSS EX475? Simple, you've got to roll-back and get rid of the PRE-RELEASE (thanks for the memories) and install the official update from the Microsoft Downloads site. Alright then, here we go -


Earlier last month I had a couple of projects lined up for the Home Server. That is, a bunch of add-ins that I'm currently testing and have loaded up in the directory in the off-hand chance I get some time out to try them out. Hasn't happened yet, but I digress. The end result though was seemingly the WHS picked up on the uninstalled add-ins and started to alert me about the latest versions and updates.

Alrighty then, as a result here's long list of statuses that the WHSC alerted me about, saying that the MSS was at "risk". Huh? I don't think so. Thats near confusing as saying I'm "infected" with a trojan horse program, whereas we all know trojan horses don't infect --- "viruses" do.


The most notable here are the updates that were previously pulled some time in April and people have tried to get around. Good thing I waited and didn't have to brute force it. This month's bag of goodies include 64-bit compatibility, McAfee Total Protection, and the much anticipated PV Connect Media Server add-ins.

Follow-up: Turns out that alerting me about the non-installed add-ins is one of the specified behaviours of the HP MSS update.

I admit relenting to the fact that my systems are needing and thus getting a hardware update. This Home Server business isn't currently giving me anything worth real squat that my FreeNAS wasn't already giving me for FREE. Time to give it a chance to shine.

.... but first, better I give in to my other diversion in the coming weeks, and my promise of an update when it finaly arrives!