On this edition of “The Interviews”, we interview the Add-In author who's Add-In is probably sitting on more Windows Home Servers than any other Add-In that is currently available.

The Add-In author who’s Add-In is most likely in the top 5 of Add-Ins first installed by everyone when setting up their Windows Home Server for the first time.

The Add-In author who’s Add-In is sitting on the Windows Home Server’s of Add-In authors.

The Add-In author who’s Add-In...…… uh……Oh well, you get the idea!

It all started with Microsoft's innovative idea, the Windows Home Server (WHS). As the word spread so did the need for specialized software. Once more and more home users and small business invited the Windows Home Server into their realm, the WHS Add-ins craze took off. They are small and specialized software that began pop up from all corners of the globe. In the last two years many things around the WHS have changed and the improvement in the add-in quality is significant as well.

With every new add-in the functionality, stability and style are better and stronger than in previous versions. It makes one wonder what is the force that pushes all that enthusiasm and the creativity? And what is behind all these add-ins? Many people were having those same questions and we at Home Server Land (HSL) realized that there needs to be a common roaming/reading ground where those questions can and will be answered. That train of thought is how we arrived at a new Blog series, "The Interviews". The interviews blog is by no means exclusive to the add-in authors. We also ask and invite hardware and software OEM's and as well as Microsoft employees to join in. In this blog the discussions are open to everything concerning the Windows Home Server, no question is too dumb and no idea is too small. So, now let us start the interview with our special guest today.

HSL: What is your full name and how old are you?
Sam: Sam Wood, 28 (probably 29 by the time you read this).

HSL: Would you please tell us about your family and were you currently live?
Sam: I’m married to a beautiful girl I rescued from Arizona, and I currently live in Auckland, New Zealand.

We’re about to move out of our apartment into a house in the ‘burbs, which is going to be interesting. I’m not what you’d call a country boy (even though my genes would say I’m a liar – English peasantry represent!), and I think I’ll almost miss the zombie invasion that rolls through every Friday and Saturday night, but I’ll actually have an office and that can only mean more Disk Management time (yay!).

We had a couple of lizards, a snake, and two cats in Arizona, and they were definitely considered part of the family (the lizards actually had more personality than a lot of people I know). They’ll make an appearance again (minus the snake) in the new house.

HSL: Where are you originally from?
Sam: I’m originally from Hastings, New Zealand (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hastings,_New_Zealand) , though I actually grew up on Waiheke Island (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waiheke_Island), out in the Hauraki Gulf off the coast of Auckland.

 I moved to Tucson, Arizona right out of high school (refer to question 2 here), and did some work for the Platform Support team at Microsoft for a few years (if you called up for Win9x/ME or WinXP support between 2000 and 2003, you probably talked to my team). We came back to New Zealand at the end of 2003.

HSL: Do you have an avatar?
SAM: I have one avatar I generally use, because it stands out – My Little Cthulhu (http://dreamlandtoyworks.com/my_little_cthulhu.html). I’m a bit of a Mythos buff.

HSL: What do you do for a living?
Sam: Sometimes my career feels a little bit like Romeo and Juliet; I get to make “a plague on both your houses!” jokes. I do both infrastructure consulting and development work, and those two camps generally despise each other.

With infrastructure, I play in the Information Lifecycle Management space (backup, archive, data protection), as well as the general stuff everyone does now (VMware products, the Microsoft stack, some storage, a bit of networking here and there, and far too many certifications). I don’t get to stick servers into racks anymore, but I do get to design a lot of versatile solutions for modern computing.

Development-wise, I do WHS Add-Ins (obviously) as Tentacle Software (http://www.tentaclesoftware.com/) and .NET web applications with Ignition Development (http://www.ignitiondevelopment.co.nz/). Tentacle and Ignition have a couple of very interesting joint projects underway, so stay tuned, kids.

HSL: Do you have any hobbies?
Sam: I had hobbies, until I opened Visual Studio for the first time!

Mostly, I’m a gamer. I started out with choose-your-own-adventure books, and moved on to table-top role-playing games (a bit of D&D, but mostly MERP (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle-earth_Role_Playing), Vampire (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vampire:_The_Masquerade) and Shatterzone (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shatterzone)). My Dad got me into model kits when I was very young (I was perplexed when the first pharmacist in the U.S. threatened to have me arrested for wanting to buy chloroform – it’s the best plastic solvent, bar none, but he referred to it as a “dual-use technology”, whatever that means...), and that slotted right into spending far too much money buying Warhammer 40,000 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warhammer_40,000) and Heavy Gear (http://www.dp9.com/) figures.

I’ve never owned a console, but I’ve always been interested in video games. Sony gets mad if you take one of their devices apart to make it better, but the computer industry loves it, and that attitude extends to gaming on the PC platform. I play all sorts of PC games; space combat simulators, turn-based strategy, RPGs, and even third-person stealth/action hybrids. Consider this a public service announcement: go out and buy Fallout 3, right now. I’ll wait.

I’ll need to list my main desktop as a hobby, although anyone who owns as many zip ties, case fans, and CPU coolers as I do probably shouldn’t admit to it. I went through a transparent window and fluorescent lighting phase, but I consider that a folly of my youth – right now, I’m more into the black 2001 obelisk look, and as little noise as possible.

HSL: How long have you been using computers?
Sam: That depends on what you define as a computer – probably best to answer that one in reference to the Commodore 64s and Acorn Archimedes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_Archimedes) we had at school, so twenty-ish years. Something like that, anyway.

HSL: Do you remember the first computer program that you coded
Sam: My very first program that I coded (that wasn’t just copied out of a book) was a random coloured line drawing “screen saver” in BASIC, when I was 10 or 11. On the Archimedes, you could hit F12 to drop to a BASIC prompt and just start tapping away; pretty easy to make the teacher think you were doing the typing assignment while actually writing GOTO loops.

I love making computers do “stuff”, whatever that is, and interfacing with hardware is the crunchiest “stuff” you can get into. My first actual .NET app was a kill-counter for Jump to Lightspeed (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jump_to_Lightspeed) that worked with the LCD panel on the Saitek X-52 Pro (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saitek_X52) joystick, called AstroMech (http://astromech.idolatry.org/) – the code was (is) pretty awful, but it worked.

HSL: How or why did you decide to use the Windows Home Server?
Sam: I honestly can’t remember where I saw Windows Home Server for the first time, but after reading the bullet-point list of functionality (you know the one; backup, remote access, storage expansion), I was completely and totally hooked. Who doesn’t want a copy of Windows Server 2003 for US$100 that has that extra layer of creamy goodness on top?

Really, I have the same reasons for using WHS as everyone else: we have multiple PCs in the house; we’ve got lots of files going back more than a decade; I “need” direct access to my home desktop from outside the network; I have tons of older hardware and disks of assorted sizes lying around. And, it just works out of the box.

I talk to the technical team about WHS at every company I do consulting for. It just sells itself; I always leave the site with at least one or two new converts. Even my parents have WHS.

Seriously, WHS makes me feel like an Apple evangelist. I understand  their zealotry for a technological product after using WHS; I want to shout from the rooftops about how awesome it is.

HSL: Please tell us about your WHS setup?
Sam: I just finished an upgrade this weekend, actually.

My old server was an ancient Athlon XP 1800 with 2 GB of RAM, running a Silicon Image 3114 four-port SATA controller. I ran Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 on top, with a dedicated disk for virtual machines, to host my development environment (a test WHS server and a SQL/Subversion server). The whole thing ran surprisingly well, and my only complaint was the power consumption – I clocked it at 90 Watts under load.

I’ve now taken the same four SATA disks (two 1 TB and two 1.5 TB Samsungs), and built a new server. I measured it with all six disks (one System disk, one VM disk, and the four Storage Pool disks), and I get about 65 Watts under load. Not a bad improvement considering I doubled the CPU power and RAM. It’s a lot faster.

Kit list:
• Platform:
o Intel Celeron Dual-Core E1500 CPU, 2.2GHz, 800MHz FSB, Socket 775, 32/64-Bit
o Gigabyte GA-EP41-UD3L Motherboard, Socket 775, 1333MHz FSB (with three PCIe x1 slots)
o Corsair Value Select VS4GBKIT800D2, 2x2GB, DDR2-800
• Disk Controllers:
o ST Lab A-410, PCIe-1, RAID Card, 2x SATA II (two of these)
• Network:
o D-Link DGE-530T PCI Gigabit Network Interface Card
• Display:
o Asus EN8400GS Silent/HTP/512M Video Card
• Power:
o Generic late-model 300 Watt PSU (one I had lying around)
• Storage:
o Samsung EcoGreen F2 HD154UI Hard Disk Drive, 1500GB (two of these)
o Samsung HD753LJ Hard Disk Drive, 750GB (two of these)
o Western Digital Caviar SE WD1200JS Hard Disk Drive, 120 GB (two of these, I had them lying around)
• Case:
o Silverstone Kublai KL01 tower case (nice open design, a couple of 120mm fans, and a slick 4-bay hotswap enclosure)

The Storage Pool disks plug into the PCIe SATA controllers, and the System and VM disks plug into the onboard controller.

I get 80-90 MB/s between disks when balancing, and 50-60 MB/s across the network to the shared folders (up from 30 MB/s on the old system). The network runs across a Linksys (by Cisco!) SLM2008 managed gigabit switch.

On top of WHS, I’m now running VMware Server for virtualisation (so I can run 64-bit guests). For Add-Ins, I have WHS Disk Management and Grid Junction (http://www.kentdome.com/gridjunction) installed.

HSL: Which add-ins do you use on your Windows Home Server?
Sam: I’ve used all sorts of add-ins in the past, but right now I’m only using WHS Disk Management and Grid Junction on my production server. WHS is something I don’t want to have to think about or play with too often (as much as I like to), so I try to leave it alone as much as possible. Plus, it has become such a central component of our media viewing habits that I have to provide outage notifications to my wife at least a day in advance. Who knew I’d be bound by Service Level Agreements at home as well!

HSL: Why did you make this add-in(s)?
Sam: I started WHS Disk Management to fill a hole for my own initial WHS implementation – there is no way for users with custom-built servers to tell which disk is which inside the WHS Console, especially if the disks are identical models. OEM units have fancy LEDs that blink different colours depending on the state of a disk, but no one has yet developed a home-brew hardware solution like that for custom boxes.

I was hacking together a very basic add-in for my own use when I saw a post asking for help with the same disk identification issues I was experiencing. I put out a few screenshots and learned how to build MSI installers using WiX, and the rest (as they say) is history.

HSL: How would you improve or change the WHS platform?
Sam: The WHS platform, now, is pretty stable – I certainly have no complaints with the base functionality. Unfortunately, we’re still living with the PR legacy of the original data corruption bug; it’s long since been fixed (and very few people encountered it anyway), but I still see people bringing it up as a reason to avoid using WHS.

From a development platform perspective, there are  a few rough edges to the SDK. For example, we can tell when WHS is preparing to load our add-ins, and run code appropriately, but there’s no method in the SDK to tell us when the user closes the console or changes to a different tab.

A lot of the fun bits are also hard to get to (disk management tasks, like kicking off the add disk wizard, come to mind), or not designed with a 3rd party developer in mind (most of the WHS user controls don’t play well with the designer in Visual Studio, for example) – I don’t think Microsoft realised how far we’d take add-in functionality when they put together the SDK specifications.

I’d love to see the WHS Console split from the actual implementation of the underlying services – for example, the Console shouldn’t really be running the disk remove tasks, because there are too many things that could cause the Console process to fail. The Console should only be there to send commands and wait for feedback from some sort of underlying service layer, and to display the results with some pretty graphics.

Overall though, I think WHS is a great platform, both from an infrastructure and development platform perspective. I certainly can’t imagine doing without my little magic box in the corner.

HSL: Do you have any new projects or what else are you working on?
Sam: I do have some other projects under way, yes. I’m working with Ignition Development on a couple of ideas, but nothing that we’re ready to talk about a whole lot. They’re things I’ve prototyped in the past, again to work around issues I had with my own setup, that I think will be appealing to a certain segment of the WHS user-base.

Of course, there’s always more Disk Management code to work on. We’ve had the beta for v1.1 going for a few weeks now, and that’s looking very shiny. We still have some more changes to work through, but I really think it’ll be a great release – not only has the GUI been redesigned, but I’ve shifted away from doing everything inside the Console to using a Windows Service. It’s a better model (and follows the WHS Developer Guidelines), and that’s allowed me to add quite a bit of functionality that I haven’t been able to incorporate until now.

Name Location Website Add-ins

Sam Wood Auckland, New Zealand www.tentaclesoftware.com WHS Disk Management