WHS or Ubuntu for LAN server?

[Muse]

I've been thinking that WHS would be nice because of the sophisticated and convenient backup capabilities I've been hearing about. I've never used either OS. Never dabbled in Linux distros, but people are saying that Ubuntu can function nicely as a server OS. I'm probably going to assemble an MSI Wind barebone system running 2 GB RAM and one or two 1 or 1.5 GB HDs.

Can Ubuntu be pretty easily set up to do automatic backups the way WHS can?

 

[JackMDS]

The Backup capbility are native to WHS and are not availble on other OS'.

WHS can do more than File s server and it is very stable and low on resources.

You cab find more here, http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2029756

Here, http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2040351

And here, http://www.ezlan.net/WHS.html

.

 

[Red Squirrel]

I'd go with a flavor of Linux (whether it's Ubuntu, CentOS etc). Once you have it setup it's very rock solid, and pretty much set and forget. It's also a nice learning experience. You are also not restricted in anyway if you choose to grow your setup. Windows tends to put all sorts of limitations in places you would not even think of, and it will hit you eventually. (max number of connections, ram, stuff like that) I've also heard WHS does not support 64-bit, but I'm not sure if that's true or not. If you're building a new machine, you want to go 64-bit for the hardware and the OS.

32-bit is so 10 years ago. You'll also want lot of ram that way you can also use the server for virtualization.

WHS is more user friendly though. Linux is harder to setup, and you'll find yourself scripting most of the stuff like backups etc.

 

[Nothinman]

Personally, I'd go with Linux. But that's mostly because it's what I know best. I'd would probably take me half the time to get what I need running on Linux compared to Windows.

Never dabbled in Linux distros, but people are saying that Ubuntu can function nicely as a server OS.

Just about any Linux distro will make a fine server, but the learning curve will be higher for the basic stuff.

If you decide on Ubuntu go with a LTS release so you don't have to worry about upgrades every 6mo.

Can Ubuntu be pretty easily set up to do automatic backups the way WHS can?

Probably not as simply as WHS since it has a Windows backup client or something packaged with it.

WHS is more user friendly though. Linux is harder to setup, and you'll find yourself scripting most of the stuff like backups etc.

That's not exactly a ringing endorsement...

 

[Red Squirrel]

That's not exactly a ringing endorsement...

Just stating the truth. I do find Linux is better and more solid, and overall less limited, but that comes with a price, and that's ease of use. If you want it to do something you have to script it. Not a bad thing, but it might be a drawback for people who just want something up and running straight out of the box.

 

[Nothinman]

Just stating the truth. I do find Linux is better and more solid, and overall less limited, but that comes with a price, and that's ease of use. If you want it to do something you have to script it. Not a bad thing, but it might be a drawback for people who just want something up and running straight out of the box.

Except that scripting is usually the last resort, for example, there's things like backuppc and bacula for backups. Or if you want you could just use the built-in Windows Backup and have it save files to the SMB share, no scripting required.

 

[Muse]

Except that scripting is usually the last resort, for example, there's things like backuppc and bacula for backups. Or if you want you could just use the built-in Windows Backup and have it save files to the SMB share, no scripting required.

Um, SMB share = what? Don't know the acronym...

Scripting, I do 4th level language programming, FoxPro, Visual FoxPro, have had some experience with other languages, the scripting mentioned here refers to what language?

My current backup strategies are primitive. When I want to back up a folder or tree I select it and paste it over the former on the backup media, affirm I want to write over what's already there. It seems wasteful and unnecessary to overwrite files if they haven't changed, but that's obviously what Windows is doing. Damn, I think I could write a better system in FoxPro, but it seems dumb to have to do that.

 

[Nothinman]

Um, SMB share = what? Don't know the acronym...

Server Message Block, one of the names for Windows file sharing. The other being CIFS.

Scripting, I do 4th level language programming, FoxPro, Visual FoxPro, have had some experience with other languages, the scripting mentioned here refers to what language?

Actually it depends on what you want to use. The most common are probably shell, perl and python with Ruby gaining popularity with some people.

My current backup strategies are primitive. When I want to back up a folder or tree I select it and paste it over the former on the backup media, affirm I want to write over what's already there. It seems wasteful and unnecessary to overwrite files if they haven't changed, but that's obviously what Windows is doing.

There are dozens of ways to fix that with or without Linux. Overwriting files like that is a bit wasteful, but CPU cycles and disk time are pretty cheap. I'd be more worried about screwing something up and not having done a copy/paste recently. At the very least you should setup "Previous Versions" or whatever it's called that Windows uses to setup VSS snapshots.

 

[zerogear]

Easy question for you: What do you usually run on most of your Desktops/PCs? If your answer is Windows, go for WHS, considering there are ready made Backup system and it is set it and forget it. There are various add-ons that are already made to extend the backup such as add-ons that can backup to Amazon S3 (Off-site/Cloud backup) automagically. There are also alternatives like KeepVault if you prefer that.

If you run other OS (MacOSX, Linux, etc) the best option for you would probably be a Linux server. Though the HP WHS does support Mac OSX Time machine backups (I think).

 

[gsaldivar]

Can Ubuntu be pretty easily set up to do automatic backups the way WHS can?

The Backup capbility are native to WHS and are not availble on other OS'.

To be fair...

While Microsoft's own backup product is obviously tied to their own platform - there are many, many options for doing automatic data backups using a free, open-source Linux-based server.

http://www.bacula.org/en/
http://samba.anu.edu.au/rsync/
http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/index.html
http://www.nasbackup.com/wiki/Introduction
http://www.gaztronics.net/rsync.php
http://www.aboutmyip.com/AboutMyXApp/DeltaCopy.jsp
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/2006.11.utilityspotlight.aspx
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/2009.04.utilityspotlight.aspx

 

[WhoBeDaPlaya]

My current backup strategies are primitive. When I want to back up a folder or tree I select it and paste it over the former on the backup media, affirm I want to write over what's already there. It seems wasteful and unnecessary to overwrite files if they haven't changed, but that's obviously what Windows is doing. Damn, I think I could write a better system in FoxPro, but it seems dumb to have to do that.

Then get a little less primitive. I use Beyond Compare and it is a Godsend (and not just for backup purposes)!

 

[notposting]

WHS does have some other nice perks (in a Windows-centric environment):

obviously the automatic backups are nice (and smart enough not to duplicate the same file from multiple pcs)
the file sharing is pretty transparent
use it to have your media center recordings get automatically archived
remote access to your server is pretty easy to setup

The killer for me anyway is the drive extender tech. No fussing with RAID, no horrible catastrophe's when the system drive goes down, easy to add additional drives, just standard NTFS volumes, and the selectable folder duplication is nice (you select what data you would like on multiple drives).

Did see that someone is working on something similar for Linux on here though. Otherwise, to me, that is really the killer feature.

 

[MStele]

Its drive extender versus raid. WHS has a elegant approach to data redundancy without giving up compatibility. In my opinion drive extender tech alone is worth spending the money on WHS. If you have the money to setup a raid 5 array with raid certified hard drives and a solid controller, then linux makes a great server platform, but for most people WHS is a cheaper more elegant way to go, and will get you to the same place....albeit with much less heartache. Linux is free, which is always nice, but raid is not, so you gotta look at the big picture.

The best thing I like about WHS is expandability. It's very easy to drop in another Sata controller and add drives and dramatically increase capacity with little effort.

 

[Muse]

Easy question for you: What do you usually run on most of your Desktops/PCs? If your answer is Windows, go for WHS, considering there are ready made Backup system and it is set it and forget it. There are various add-ons that are already made to extend the backup such as add-ons that can backup to Amazon S3 (Off-site/Cloud backup) automagically. There are also alternatives like KeepVault if you prefer that.

If you run other OS (MacOSX, Linux, etc) the best option for you would probably be a Linux server. Though the HP WHS does support Mac OSX Time machine backups (I think).

Yeah, got to admit I'm a " real Windows guy," as a coworker observed one day. I know most of the basic features pretty well, but I've never used Windows Backup or whatever they have in there. Well, I tried and didn't get far.

WHS would be the easy route. OTOH, I think I'd benefit from exposure to an open source OS.

I know that WHS has a great reputation and there's a lot of add-ons out there for it. Haven't seen a machine with it installed yet, much less used it, though.

 

[Muse]

Its drive extender versus raid. WHS has a elegant approach to data redundancy without giving up compatibility. In my opinion drive extender tech alone is worth spending the money on WHS. If you have the money to setup a raid 5 array with raid certified hard drives and a solid controller, then linux makes a great server platform, but for most people WHS is a cheaper more elegant way to go, and will get you to the same place....albeit with much less heartache. Linux is free, which is always nice, but raid is not, so you gotta look at the big picture.

The best thing I like about WHS is expandability. It's very easy to drop in another Sata controller and add drives and dramatically increase capacity with little effort.

RAID is something I've heard about again and again and again, and I've read so many posts about it, probably could have implemented it but never have. I know there are various types of RAID, and to my knowledge they are designed to either add data security, system robustness or added responsiveness. I haven't really suffered from the lack of any of these (at least not to the extent where I started looking for other solutions than what I had available to me with the equipment and OSs I was using), so haven't bothered with RAID arrays. I'm curious because so many people do use RAID, so I figure there's something there I should probably get into somehow.

However, the explanation above makes it sound like the flexibility of WHS actually comes at a lower price (and a lot less work), so I guess I will actually go with WHS. It's the effectiveness of the redundancy/backup features that initially attract me, and the easy expandability sounds great too.

 

[StormSide]

Freenas?


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeNAS

 

[whoiswes]

Freenas?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeNAS

Or the Debian-based fork of the project, OpenMediaVault (currently in development, will probably be released this quarter)

http://blog.openmediavault.org

 

[Muse]

Freenas?


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeNAS

I read a post yesterday saying that FreeNAS performance was considerably inferior to that of Ubuntu (in that user's experience, over 30&#37, IIRC. I believe it was in the customer reviews of the MSI Wind barebones systems at Newegg.

 

[mvbighead]

I read a post yesterday saying that FreeNAS performance was considerably inferior to that of Ubuntu (in that user's experience, over 30&#37, IIRC. I believe it was in the customer reviews of the MSI Wind barebones systems at Newegg.

There are thousands of reviews on Newegg that are completely bogus. Not sure that is a ringing endorsement.

All I can say to the OP is, having not used WHS, if you're looking for ease and simplicity with your Windows desktop PC, your best bet is to spend the money on WHS. If you want a learning experience, give a Linux distro a try. CentOS would be a good one IMO that won't require your to update every six months. Upon trying that, if you find it too cumbersome and aren't seeing the results you would like, pull up www.newegg.com and order yourself a copy of WHS. The price won't fluctuate much, if at all, so if you buy now or later, it shouldn't really matter.

 

[Nothinman]

CentOS would be a good one IMO that won't require your to update every six months.

Personally, I would suggest against CentOS. I'm admittedly biased, but I've never liked yum and the available repositories are extremely small compared to those in Debian and thus Ubuntu.

 

[BTA]

WHS works great for me.

Someone in another thread mentioned Amahi as a linux project with a similar list of features to WHS.

I installed Amahi real quick in a virtual machine and it seemed to work fine. If that interests you you could look at that. Installation was easy enough by following their installation instructions.

I have no reason to replace my WHS box though because it does everything I need and more. Very stable so far.

 

[Binky]

WHS = brain dead simple

Linux = much more configurable and maybe more powerful (for what you need)

I'm lazy, and I only have windows machines that need backups, so I chose WHS.