Windows Home Server

Posts Tagged ‘Windows Home Server’

How to diagnose a client backup failure with Windows Home Server

Tuesday, June 8th, 2010

Recently my Win7 x64 desktop machine started to fail it’s backups to the Windows Home Server I have. I attempted to do manual backups but it just hung at 0% complete as per the screen shot below.

To diagnose the problem, I looked at the client side log files which are located at C:\Users\All Users\Microsoft\Windows Home Server\logs on the computer.

In particular I looked at the BackupEngine log file (it’s name is a fair bit longer and is based on the date/time that the last backup was done). You can see my log file below. It appears to be failing at the VSS Snapshot attempts.

Ok – Run a CMD prompt now and then the use the VSSADMIN LIST WRITERS command to show the current state of the VSS writers on this computer. It gives the output below. You can see that a couple of the writers are in the “State: [5] Waiting for completion”.

Ok – now into the event logs on the server and I can see that it looks like we have a few critical errors in the VSS including the one below.

We’re on the right track now. I ran a script to re-register the VSS writers and rebooted and as you can see all the VSS writers have returned to normal.

I then ran the VSSADMIN LIST PROVIDERS command to list the providers of VSS services on this machine. It showed TWO VSS Providers, one being the standard Microsoft Software Shadow Copy Provider v1.0 and the other belonging to a third party imaging product that I was beta testing but had since removed. Given I’d removed the imaging product, the provider should not have been there, so I traced back in the registry to find that it’s registry key still existed under HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControSet\CSS\Providers. I was able to delete the offending registry key for the VSS Provider, reboot and run backups. Backups have been running just fine now for the past month without issues.

Tags: Troubleshooting, Windows Home Server
Posted in FAQs | 5 Comments »

Un-Vail the beta now!

Tuesday, April 27th, 2010

I’m prevented from talking publicly about the next version of Microsoft Server products, but now that Microsoft have announced the public beta of Windows Home Server aka Vail, I can at least talk about it

I would HIGHLY recommend that ALL SMB IT Professionals look closely at the Vail beta. Why? Well think about the move to the cloud for many clients and about how Vail might well fit into the smaller client environments, allowing them central control over their files, backups of machines and so on. Vail is something Microsoft have been working on for some time and I can see how we might use this technology in our current client environments. Sure it does not have Active Directory, but honestly – when did you last use Group Policy to do anything meaningful in a 10 workstation network?

Get onto the beta TODAY here

Tags: Beta Product, Vail, Windows Home Server
Posted in Blog | 3 Comments »

Wordpress Images and Live Writer

Wednesday, December 9th, 2009

Today I solved the problem I’ve had with Live writer not being able to publish images to my WordPress blog. I’m here in Redmond with other MVPs from around the world and I was talking to Terry – the dude behind WeGotServed… not – that’s not the comedy of “Are You Being Served”, but a Windows Home Server MVP. Terry runs his site on WordPress also. Anyway long story short Terry had a similar issue and he found the solution here. There’s some changes in WordPress that require you to run a SQL command to extend the database. Did that and now woohoo, I can now blog from Wordpress WITH images without the pain. Thanks Terry.