 This is an ASUS TS Mini. It's a Windows Home Server, and it is a flavor of Windows Home Server that is custom from ASUS. I've done an unboxing video on it already, and I also did an unvideo, a video where I show how to upgrade the hard drive. So I've installed an additional 500 gig hard drive. There's one 500 gig included, and remember too, you can also use all of the expansion ports on the back including 6 USB and 2E SATA to add additional hard drive storage to this particular unit. This series of videos that I'm going to be doing over the next little while is going to be about Windows Home Server, and what makes it one of my favorite pieces of software ever. So let's have a quick look at everything we're going to need. First of all, we've got a quick start guide, then we have our user's manual, and then we have three separate disks. So the first disk we're going to use is the software installation CD. The software installation CD as it's probably going to tell me in the quick start guide. Actually, I'm going to go ahead and put this in the drive first, and then I'll go ahead and show you the quick start guide while we're working on that. So I'm going to throw this in the disk drive. The software installation CD is actually an optional step, but you can use it to install the Windows Home Server software on your home computer, which will make it so that your home computer will be able to detect and connect to a Windows Home Server, because remember, the TS Mini and many home servers does not have a VGA port, so there is actually no way to hook up a display to it. That means that you rely on your network connection to the home server in order to access its administration option. So I'm going to go ahead, run install, and this is going to install the Windows Home Server connector. So I'm going to press next. I'm going to go ahead and zoom in so you can see some idea of what I'm doing here. I accept the end user license agreement, which I have thoroughly read, and it is now trying to locate my home server. I guess I better turn it on. The light's on on the top. That's a good sign. Alright, so let's have a quick look at the quick start guide while that is doing its thing. So first up in the quick start guide is probably something along these lines. Oh, I see. Setting up your TS Mini. Aha! See, we missed this important step. Turning it on. Aha! But I've managed to do this. So I've got it connected to a power plug, as well as my ethernet cable to a gigabit switch. It's pretty important to use gigabit with home server, because it'll work with 10 hundred, but it's not going to give you a very satisfactory experience. And it should be noted that Windows Home Server will not run on a wireless connection for the home server. You can have wireless client PCs, so like that computer over there could be wireless, but the home server must be wired. Okay, so installing the software on your computer. Yes, that was the first thing I did, so I was slightly out of order. Ah, so now it's, uh, couldn't find my home server because, probably because I didn't have it plugged in at first. So I'm gonna go ahead and go to find my home server manually. And the home server name should be... Let me see if they're gonna tell me what the home server name is going to be. Hmm... No, no, they're not going to make it quite that easy for me. Okay, well why don't we try another automatic search. So we'll go back, search again, which is what is recommended. Let's just follow the recommended steps and see if that works. If you installed Windows Home Server from a disk on a custom PC, then you'll know what the name of the home server is, but I actually don't know what the name of this one is. Okay, so number three, getting started. So once it detects the home server, you will bring in the login, bring up the login window, enter the administrator password. Okay, I don't know what the admin password is for this one. Adding a hard drive, I already covered that in a separate edition of NCIX, or rather Linus Tech Tips. Setting up user accounts, okay, so that's a step that we'll get to as soon as that is done. I'm gonna go ahead and stop the camera for now. As a bit of an aside, the second automatic search failed, but I typed TS Mini with no spaces into the find it manually option, and it turned out that was the name. So I have, I guess I've hacked my TS Mini home server here. So now it's going ahead and installing the Windows Home Server connector software. It should be noted it doesn't actually install it from the disk. What it does is the disk just tells your computer how to look for a home server, and then it downloads the software from the home server and installs it from there to make sure that it has the latest edition. So you can choose here. This is one of the biggest features of home server, automatic computer backup. So it gives you a couple options. Do you want to automatically wake up this computer to back it up? Yes, I want to make sure this computer gets backed up every day, even if it is in sleep or hibernate mode. So I'm gonna go ahead and click next a couple times and hope that it registers at some point. There we go. All right, so the name of the home server here, we're finally setting it up. That didn't actually take that long, I shouldn't say finally. The name of the home server is going to be TS Mini, sure, that's fine. The password, now, something you should be aware of is that the password, here we go, must contain characters of at least three of the following sets, uppercase, lowercase, numbers, and symbols. So I'm gonna go ahead and type a password, and I'm not gonna show you guys this because it's my actual strong password. Okay, so I'll go ahead. The reason it has to be a strong password is that the administrator account can have access to the home server from a remote location, so that means that it has to be a password that would be quite difficult to guess. All right, we are going to use the recommended settings to stay up to date, and it's preparing the home server, so I'll let you know about how long this took, but I'm gonna turn off the camera for now. Okay, well, that took about three minutes, that's not so bad. It installed all of the updates that I need. I'm gonna go ahead and click start, and then I'm going to enter my password, which I need two hands for, sorry about that. I'm not sure if I typed it right, because it takes a little while to sign in. Yeah, I did not type it right, sorry about that. Let's try that one more time. Oh, I also added an internet connection to my switch here, because I realized that it was trying to download updates, and I did not have a network cable plugged into my router. I saw that there were a couple of hints that it gave you while it was installing, and there were a couple pretty helpful ones, remember the password. Make sure you do not forget the password, because it would be quite difficult to re-obtain if you lost it. And then one of the other hints that I thought was pretty helpful was this one. You can stream media to every room with Windows Home Server, so you can stream to another PC or to an Xbox 360. Hmm, okay, just a minute. Well, I guess it was installing some updates and restarting, because now I have connected to the Windows Home Server console. The first thing that comes up is the console help. It says, welcome to Windows Home Server. Explore the Windows Home Server tray icon on your home computer, okay, and it tells you what all of the different statuses mean. So right now you can see that it is gray, although that's not entirely correct, because it is healthy or not. No, maybe it's critical, because it says it's critical up here. Whatever, we'll figure that out later. Okay, add user accounts, organize files and shared folders, configure backup, customize server settings. Okay, I'm going to show you how to do all of this, so forget this. All right, so computers and backups. So you can see the one computer that I have configured is the one that I installed the Windows Home Server connector software on. So this one, let's configure the backups. So view backups. Right now I don't have any. Okay. I wonder why I can't configure backups right now. That's kind of weird. Maybe we need to set up a user account first. All right, user account. Don't show this message again. Okay, I'm going to go ahead and add a user account. So user account first name is going to be Linus. Okay. Last name is optional. My login name is going to be Linus. Now if I enable remote access, which means I can access all of my files from anywhere, and I can actually use remote desktop connection to any supported PC on my home network. So you should only use that for people who you want doing those things. So in this case I'm going to say I don't need to bother with, oh, you know what? No, I should enable it because that way we can test it later. So we can pick which of these options are allowed. All right, so that means I have to choose a strong password. At least seven characters, and it has to be a complex password, so three different types of characters. So set access to shared folders. These are all the folders that I will have access to besides my own personal folder. So if you have multiple user accounts, those will appear in there as well. You can set who has access to whose shared folder. So now we have gone ahead and created that account. So that's a very strange thing. Network is critical because I do not have antivirus software installed on my, on KPC, which I don't. So thank you for letting me know that. So this has been a basic setup guide, shared folders. Let's just stop it there and then I'll cover some of the other features in separate videos.