Well I finally got all the bits together to build the box to run Home Server. For those that care it is:
- Asus M2n4-SLI board £40
- 1GB of 4200 DDR2 £10
- AMD Sempron 3200 £25
- 80GB IDE hard disk Free (my spare drive)
- nVidia PCI 5200 video card on loan from my good friend Martin.
And did it all go smoothly once I dropped in the DVD and rebooted ? Pretty much yes. It is rather spooky to be installing Windows Server for a home environment. I have run it in the past on the basis that it is the kind of thing only a true nerd would do but now of course, it is going mainstream.
Once you have agreed that your hard disk will be wiped, it says it’ll be about half an hour and installs itself with familiar graphic and white-text-on-blue screens. During this process it restarts twice. There is a pause in all this chaos whilst it asks for a server name, country and keyboard type followed by the request for the licence key (which you can skip and enter later if like me you had forgotten where you put the bit of paper).
Then it goes mad teasing you with one of those bulletted installation screens where you think you are at stage 4 out of 5 and it’ll be any second now… Eventually it finishes and presents you with the welcome screen.
After asking you for a password to secure the server it tells you not to do anything as you might break something as you should instead go and put the connector CD in a workstation and go play from there.
At this stage of course, I got keen to poke about. 
One thing I wanted to do was to fix the LAN IP address to ensure I didn’t get in a pickle later. I also had to activate Windows to enter that validation key. Trouble is that Home Server couldn’t find the network card built onto the motherboard. I need to dig out some drivers for it then.
At least I got the majority of it working. I’m off to Centerparcs tomorrow though so it’ll have to wait for a few days. If anyone reading this has experience with this one or knows a good set of drivers for the LAN chipset on the M2N4-SLI, please add a comment.
