Recently Linux-Watch.com ran an article on how to do the same job as Windows Home Server with Linux. It’s annoying that people, even those qualified enough to write articles on prominent websites, seem to fall victim to misunderstanding what various platforms offer.
The article is written in such a way that makes it appear that WHS can be replaced with a simple Linux install. This will lead people to try out Linux (not a bad thing admittedly), but then get annoyed that it can’t do everything that WHS can do. This is the mantra of games players that want to switch to Linux, and developers that are immersed in the likes of Microsofts .net environment. WHS is interesting, it can do a lot of neat things. One of the things it just isn’t is “a vanilla file server.”. A few scrapings from the Wikipedia page about it include…
Centralized backup with Single Instance Store – something to allow you to backup all your machines automatically using a glorified binary delta to save space. Almost like incremental backups, but with less of the technical speak involved. People just want to click on “Restore backup from Monday” and expect the computer to do it, but without them having to worry about a full backup for every day.
Health Monitoring – a way of overseeing the state of all your machines in the network. Please correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t see any way of doing this with Linux just now. Yes, us Linux users don’t need to worry about antivirus and antispyware, but one day though, the time will come when we wish we did have some form of defence. Your average two child family will have 3, maybe 4 computers. Whose job is it to oversee them all and ensure they are safe for the kids? Do you really want to go delving into each one every week to see that it’s up to date? No, you’d rather just have a few tickboxes on a web page to have a look at.
Volume Shadow Copies – just like Apples Time Machine, except implemented here and now. The Linux-Watch article doesn’t even go near this subject, because it would involve craziness with filesystem snapshots, rollbacks, rollforwards and other system admin stuff. Volume Shadow may be inherently crap, but it’s still done in a nice fluffy interface for Joe User to click on.
Expandable Storage – just like lvm and mdadm… except without the command line. Wait until Joe User wants to add a disk to his Linux Home Server, and you point him at the LVM2 command set, or maybe, if he’s lucky, some LVM2 graphical admin tools. Yes, Linux is free and more flexible, but it doesn’t come preinstalled on the machine ‘for free’. Maybe if you tied a Drobo unit to a Linux box you’d be getting somewhere, but that’s even more of a capital outlay.
I can’t believe I’m actually defending WHS here. I’ve been a Linux user for almost 10 years now, but unfortunately Microsoft have done it again, and us Linux enthusiasts are going to compare apples to oranges and then try to defend our actions with what would best be described as a sub-standard solution.
One day someone will come out with a shiny admin tool for lvm2 and mdadm. This will go beautifully with the Samba VSC VFS module and the native Windows VSC client. All that would remain is for someone to knock up some form of network interface and web server to report on Windows current health status.
In the meantime, we have to evaluate what our friends want when they ask us to help us set up their first home server. Plain old file and print serving? Great, Samba is ideal with a nice little domain for them to integrate logons and profiles with. Backups, online disk expansion, joined-up antivirus and antispyware protection, file versioning? WHS. It’s a shame, and I’d love to be proved wrong. Please, prove me wrong.
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