What do you run on your WHS and why ?

[Philgr]

So i finally have some time to kill over the xmas period to start to play around with this N54L that i got 6 months ago,

 

i have the N54L running WHS2012ER2 with a couple of shares and and some backups to a Synology NAS, DCHP and DNS

 

I am sure i can use it for some other stuff and I'm looking for some inspiration on how and what else i can use it for 

 

So come on guys what do you run on your WHS and most importantly Why ?

Edited December 23, 2013 by Philgr

[jmwills]

Remote access to data.

[ikon]

You mentioned backups, but not specifically client PC backups, so I'll mention it. MS has, IMHO, the best home-user client PC backup system available. I'm not saying it can't stand improvement -- I can think of several things that would improve it significantly -- but it is pretty great as it is.

 

Media streaming is another use.

[cskenney]

There are some who live by the theory that less is more.  Meaning if you are depending on the WHS box to be a stable source of your data then you may not want to pile on lots of additional tasks or software.

[Philgr]

Thanks for the replies guys

 

The N54l is actually the only windows PC, in the home, the rest of my kit is all apple OSX and iOS

 

I will look into how to get the server set-up as a time machine target so I can have client backup and then the server backs-up to the symbology NAS, all my really important stuff is also backed up to a cloud service

 

Phil G

[ikon]

I believe people have tried to set up WHS2011 as a Time Machine target in the past. I'm not sure if any got it working, but I do recall that they all ran into issues.

[jcollison]

You haven't truly experienced the N54L until you have done a hardware mod.  Have you watched all of John Stutsman's videos and read his posts? There's some ideas for you.  Who need software?

[Jason]

Last I knew there wasn't a 64 bit version of Netatalk required to host a Time Machine on WHS 2011. I successfully created a Mac sparse bundle locally and moved to a WHS share, was able to mount it and use it as a TM destination. However the biggest drawback is that you cannot mount the bundle this way on Mac boot for disaster recovery which is one of the true benefits of TM.

[ikon]

Thanks Jason. That's one of the things I recall reading about. It doesn't seem there's nice, seamless solution for WHS2011 and Mac OS.

[Jason]

The only option I found that worked was to host a FreeNAS VM under VMWare on WHS and enable the necessary Apple protocol(s) built into FreeNAS. This method can be accessed on Mac boot. Only issue I encountered was somewhat poor network throughput even on a gigabit LAN. May have been a limitation of my virtual NIC driver and you may experience better performance.