While the HP MediaSmart Server is largely targeted to households with operating systems running Microsoft Windows, Mac users can still take advantage of many of the important features of the server.

Introduction

The HP MediaSmart Server is geared towards home users that need to manage, store, share, and protect an ever-increasing amount of digital content. Precious and often irreplaceable photos, music, videos, and other valuable documents are often scattered on various computers around the house or on remote web pages somewhere on the Internet. Plus, a growing number of households are using their computers to manage their finances, and keep valuable “life” documents such as wills, home inventories, and medical records. The desire to easily share your digital entertainment media and protect valuable documents demands a centralized repository that promotes sharing while providing protection from data loss.

The HP MediaSmart Server is an excellent solution for the dilemma of managing a home’s digital resources. It seamlessly supports up to ten PCs over the household network, providing file sharing services, supporting web-based photo sharing, automatically backing up the PCs and as a center for digital entertainment (e.g., streaming media). Importantly, it also supports remote access to files and PCs from anywhere there is an Internet connection.

But what about households that have Apple products? Because the HP MediaSmart Server is based on Microsoft’s Windows Home Server operating system, it is necessarily more Windows-friendly—can Macs take advantage of the HP MediaSmart Server?

The answer is “yes.” There are several important features of the HP MediaSmart Server that can be accessed from either a Windows-based system or a Mac (running Mac OS X). There are some features that are accessible, but with limited functionality, and there are a few features that require a Windows-based system to access. This paper takes a look at those features, illustrates the differences, and describes ways to leverage the HP MediaSmart Server in a mixed operating system environment.

Figure 1. The HP MediaSmart Server in a mixed-OS environment.

An overview of the HP MediaSmart Server

First, let’s take a quick look at the HP MediaSmart Server and the technology behind it. The HP MediaSmart Server provides server functionality for family members—giving users convenient access to their digital content from anywhere they have access to their home network or the Internet.

Features

Features for users that are on a Windows-based computer include:

• A photo sharing tool that lets users create photo albums and share them with friends and relatives across the Internet.
• A way to serve up iTunes music—any computer system on the network that runs iTunes (including PCs and Macs) can access iTunes music from the HP MediaSmart Server shared library.
• An integrated and automated network-wide backup and restore capability—the HP MediaSmart Server is automatically configured to backup every Windows-based PC  on the network every day.
• Support for Xbox 360™, Internet connected TV’s, or other Windows Media® Connect-supported devices, allowing enjoyment of digital media on the family’s entertainment center.
• Storage management functionality that can be setup to duplicate selected folders on separate hard disk drives as an added layer of protection. It also provides easy expansion of hard disk storage as needs grow, and without any complicated system-level commands.

Hardware and software

The HP MediaSmart Server is essentially a small PC, designed from the ground up as a home server. Design emphasis is on high performance network connectivity, quietness, and the ability to handle a large amount of disk storage supported by a range of interfaces. The modern appearance fits nicely in a home environment, for example, the administrator has the ability to vary the brightness of the LED indicators on the chassis.

Each hard disk drive in the HP MediaSmart Server is enclosed in a carrier that unlatches and slides out of the enclosure once the front door is opened (Figure 2). The carriers require no tools to remove/insert, use no cables, and can be hot-swapped (removed or inserted without powering down the HP MediaSmart Server). The carriers also isolate much of the vibrations or noise from the hard disk drives to reduce overall noise emissions from the unit.

The I/O subsystem supports up to four internal hard disk drives, an external serial-attached (SATA) interface, and up to four external USB hard disk drives. In conjunction with the Windows Home Server operating system, hard disk drives can be added and removed “on the fly,” permitting easy expansion of available storage without complicated disk management processes.

Figure 2. HP MediaSmart Server hardware.



The HP MediaSmart Server Control Center is a small Windows-based program that runs on the client PC and is the graphical user interface (GUI) for the casual user to easily access shared folders, HP Photo Webshare, the iTunes server and the Windows Home Server Console. The control center GUI itself is not available to Mac OS users, but for the most part the functionality is available through some other means. In subsequent sections we will discuss the specifics of how a Mac user can recreate the functionality of the HP MediaSmart Server Control Center using standard Mac OS X features.

Functionality provided by the Windows Home Server operating system also depends upon Windows-based clients and will be limited on a Mac OS X system. This functionality includes Windows Home Server administrative functions (e.g., maintaining accounts on the HP MediaSmart Server, managing remote access), automated backup, restore and PC health monitoring.

File system

The file system supported by Windows Home Server (and thus supported by the HP MediaSmart Server) is one of the strongest features of the product. To make management and use easier, Windows Home Server introduces a new disk management technology called Windows Home Server Drive Extender. Drive Extender manages all of the hard disk drives in the server, and presents them to users on the network as a single large volume.

Drive Extender also introduces Folder Duplication, a new way of protecting data. Folder Duplication is enabled/disabled by the administrator (using the Windows Home Server Console, only available from a PC). Folders with duplication enabled are automatically and transparently copied to two separate hard disk drives to protect the files against a hard disk drive failure. For example, you would probably enable Folder Duplication for a library of digital photos; if a hard disk drive failure makes one of the drives inaccessible, all of your photos are still available on the other hard disk drive. (Note that if there is only one hard disk drive, Folder Duplication is not available.) Once set up, Drive Extender is inherent in Windows Home Server, irrespective of the client operating system that is accessing the file system on the server.

Of particular importance to Mac OS users is the availability of the file system on the network. Windows Home Server exports selected sharepoints of its filesystem on the network using Microsoft’s Server Message Block (SMB) application-level network protocol. SMB is used mainly on Windows systems to share access to files and printers between nodes on a network.

The good news is that Apple integrated SMB file sharing in Mac OS X 10.1 (the current Mac OS is 10.5—very few Apple systems would be running 10.1 as it was an early release of Mac OS X) . Additionally, some enhancements were made in the 10.5 version of Mac OS X to make it easier to access SMB sharepoints. The bottom line is that any functionality that relies on accessing sharepoints on the HP MediaSmart Server is available equally on Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X (Figure 3). For example, Mac OS X users may access photos on the HP MediaSmart Server Pictures sharepoint, importing them into iPhoto on the Mac system to create books, calendars, and order prints.

Figure 3. HP MediaSmart Server shared filesystems are available from both Windows and Mac OS X-based systems.

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