Add-In Author Interview #8 - Home Server Land - Home Server Land

On this edition of “The Interviews”, we shine the spotlight on an Add-In author as well known for his hacks, as he is for his Add-In. Most first generation HP MediaSmart Server owners will know him as the one who helped us upgrade the processors and RAM in our Ex470 and 475 Windows Home Servers. A few of his accomplishments include, turning a humidor into a WHS, making a few Apple PC diehards mad, and slapping a WHS sticker on Steve Ballmer’s forehead.

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?
Donavon: Donavon West, old

HSL: Would you please tell us about your family and were you currently live.
Donavon: I currently live in Baltimore with my beautiful wife Alyssa and our wonderful 9 month baby boy Revel who was born on Christmas day and just took his first steps a day before his nine month birthday. I have a 22 year old son, Evan, who lives in Chicago and is a pro at walking (see "how old are you" above).

You can read more about me, my family and my personal rambling on at my blog: http://donavon.com

HSL: Where are you originally from?
Donavon: I was born in California but grew up in Fort Dodge, Iowa until I was old enough to get the #$%! out of Dodge and move to Chicago where I lived for many years.

HSL: Do you have an avatar?
Donavon: I've used this blue picture of myself for my avatar for years. Give it a few seconds and the teeth will glean and the left eye will blink.

HSL: What do you do for a living?
Donavon: Right now nothing. My gadget consulting business has slowed to a crawl and I'm actively seeking FTE. What a perfect time for a gratuitous plug for my resume/portfolio website! http://donavon.com/resume

My job search has been the main reason that HomeServerHacks has been on hiatus for several months. I am slowly picking it back up with some new articles, and getting back to my roots with fewer "fluff" articles. It's also hard with a 9 month old just trying to find the hours in a day.

HSL: Do you have any hobbies?
Donavon: I just love to code. That and the aforementioned 9 month old baby keeps me busy shooting terabytes of photos. Good things I have a Windows Home Server to safely store them on!

HSL: How long have you been using computers?
Donavon: My first computer was a TRS-80 back in about 1979. It didn't have a floppy or hard drive but instead used cassette tapes. I also owned an original IBM PC model 5150 complete with a green screen monochrome monitor and 5 1/4" floppy drives. It ran IBM PC DOS. Interrupts? TSRs? Bueller? anyone? anyone?

HSL: Do you remember the first computer program that you coded?
Donavon: When you typed on the TRS-80, sometimes you would get two or more keys on the screen. This generally meant that you needed to pull the key cap and clean out any dust/lint with a q-tip and some alcohol. To help reduce the problem, I wrote a keyboard de-bouncer that got rid of the unwanted or bounced keys. It was hand coded Z80 machine language (i.e. not even assembler) and was maybe all of 30 bytes long (bytes not kilobytes).

HSL: How or why did you decide to use the Windows Home Server?
Donavon: I bought a EX470 from Amazon.com when it first came on the market because it sounded cool. I started tinkering with it upgrading the RAM from 512MB to 2GB. I decided to write a blog post detailing how I did it and that is how HomeServerHack.com got it's start.

Here's where I really must give credit to my wife Alyssa. She was working at the NIH (National Institutes of Health) at the time in Washington DC. Her science background pushed me to be overly detailed on the memory upgrade article. If it were up to me, the entire article would have been one paragraph long. She pushed me to take pictures of every little step (even the obvious ones) and draw little red arrows pointing to the pertinent part of the picture. She said "it may be obvious to you, but other people may not know". It was because of Alyssa that the article was so successful.

HSL: Please tell us about your WHS setup?
Donavon: I'm still running my original EX470 as my "production" server. It has upgraded RAM and a new processor and a four drive external eSATA enclosure. It's filled with a mix of old 500GB and 750GB drives, although earlier tonight I removed a 500GB drive and replaced it with a 1.5TB drive.

Every night the folder shares on my production WHS are synced over to a 10 drive/10TB rack home server. I use this as a "just in case scenario" for my important data. Furthermore, my photos, music and user folders are synced to an external fireproof/waterproof ioSafe Solo (my "doomsday scenario"). Until earlier in the year, I was also using Amazon S3 backup via JungleDisk (my "double secret doomsday scenario"), but it was costing about $10/month so I dropped that.

I have all of that housed in the laundry room in the basement. It's connected to the rest of the house via a Gigabit network switch and CAT6.

Upstairs in my office I have an HP EX485 and an HP LX195 (mostly for testing), a Shuttle KPC (my $300 DIY build) and various other OEM, DIY and "under construction" systems. I've converted some of my wackiers builds back to workstation PCs like the Asus EeeBox Home Server and the Mac Mini iHomeServer.

Oh, I also have a HomeServidor (part home server, part humidor) in my office where I keep about a dozen cigars nice and fresh. Was that gratuitous plug #2 or #3, I've lost count?

HSL: Which add-ins do you use on your Windows Home Server?
Donavon: The first add-in I always install is Sam Wood's Disk Management. I am also running my own @WHSTweet of course :)

HSL: Why did you make this add-in(s)?
Donavon: When it comes to writing WHS Add-Ins, I'm really a newbie. I'm a front end developer and a bit of a JavaScript ninja. But shortly after Microsoft announced it's Windows Home Server Technical Library I was reading the documentation on Add-Ins. I was all caught up in the excitement and started playing around with writing a Windows Home Server Add-in of my own. The idea for @WHSTweet was really pretty simple. It was at the peak of my twitter usage and so using twitter as a messaging platform seemed like a no-brainer.

@WHSTweet was designed and written in two pieces (BTW, I second Sam Wood's "things should run as a service" statement from the his interview):
• WHS Console User Interface - This is the part that you see and interact with. It displays the pretty graphics, text boxes and radios buttons, allowing you to specify the features that you want.
• Windows Service - This is the part that does all of the work. It runs in the background listening for WHS health status messages and sends them out as tweets.
The entire project was written in under a week, but it's not until you ship your first "beta" that you realize exactly how much more work there is to do! :)

I also wrote two Vista/Windows 7 desktop gadgets that are WHS related. One is called ShareMaster for Windows Home Server. The gadget has two main functions. Clicking on one of the six icons will open a Windows Explorer window to the share in question allowing you to browse the files in that share. The other feature (which I think is a lot cooler) is the ability to drag and drop files onto the gadget's various icons. For example, you can quickly and conveniently drag a photo from your computer onto the ShareMaster Photo icon to copy it to your Windows Home Server's Photos share (i.e. \\server\photos).

HSL: How would you improve or change the WHS platform?
Donavon: I would design it so that you could combine your Media Center PC and WHS into one box with TV Tuner cards and all. I don't think I'm alone here.

HSL: Do you have any new projects or what else are you working on?
Donavon: I just completed a DIY WHS build for my brother-in-law. He had an old ReplayTV that I gutted and converted into a home server. It uses an Atom 330 motherboard and two 1TB green drives. The "recording" LED flashes for disk activity and the original front power switch and power LED both work as expected (required cutting and soldering). All of the gory details and photos available soon on the blog.

I'm also tinkering with jQuery plugins. I've recently written a jQuery jToday plugin and a jQuery jProgressBar plugin.