travis' brain dump

Ok, as promised here is a run down. I’m going to make an assumption that if you’ve gotten Windows 2003 Server running in your home environment there are some things I don’t have to explain. If for some reason you really don’t get it… then post a comment and I’ll take more time to reply more steps.

Here’s my scenario and the hardware used:

1x Windows 2003 Small Business Server
1x Windows Vista Ultimate (running media center)
1x XBOX 360 (connecting to the Vista Ultimate system)

As I mentioned in a previous blog, the biggest problem I ran into was finding a way to see all of my media (which was stored on the SBS server for obvious reasons) on my XBOX 360 in both media center *AND* streaming from WM11’s media connector sharing. I had searched high and low across the internet with no luck. There are possible solutions for various versions of Windows Media Center and Vista flavors but nothing that would work 100%… Here is my solution which I believe will work on any Windows system.

First and formost, iSCSI is your friend. There are a few target servers available out there but they seem to fall into the category of a) they won’t run on the version of 2003 Server you have or b) they cost insanely too much. In my searches I found one tool found over at iSCSI-Cake. It’s free, it’s small and it’s incredibly easy. Here’s what you do:

1) Download & Install iSCSI Target to your Windows 2003 System.
2) Download & Install Microsoft iSCSI Initiator to your Windows Media Center. (If you have it as part of Vista already (it’s in the control panel) skip this step.
3) Configure the Target by opening up the application… Typically you just unpack this app to your server and run it. It’s *that* easy. You then right click on the iSCSI Disk icon in the application and select ‘ New Disk ‘. From here you can pick the disk, the folder, or whatever you’re wanting to share out as an iSCSI device.
4) Configure the Initiator in Windows by filling out the correct server where necessary. (sorry i don’t have pictures of that right now and I’m not at my computer, I’m blogging this from Mexico because I have a few minutes… lol)

Once this is done, you should see some new drives in ‘My Computer’. You can change the letters if you want from Disk Management if you see fit to. Either way, this disk or disks will show up as valid hardware devices and therefore be seen from the XBOX with no issues at all. No logins are necessary as these drives are system-wide and loaded at boot. No security permissions are necessary for reading as long as ‘Everyone’ is set to read rights on the folder on the target server.

The software is a freebie from the site. I would like to try MySan from Nimbus when they come out with a compatible version but for now this has been working fine. If you setup your WM11 and your Media Center as if they were local drives on your machine, every aspect of the 360 will see it just like they were physical drives sitting in your media center. Questions or comments if I missed something obviously important *will* get a response posted. 🙂

Merry Christmas, good luck and hopefully this solves your issues as it did mine!

Now most of you have no idea what that means and for those that don’t, just stop reading here because you’re going to have a headache probably… However, I’m sure to anyone who has come across this via a google search you’re in hopes of discovering a method to being able to access media stored on your Windows 2003 Server using your XBOX 360 Media Center Extender. I hope that this is the last place you have to look for the solution.

Honestly I was getting pretty frustrated. It seemed everyone’s solution to the problem was to use login scripts and setup permissions all over the place when at the end of the day when you had tried so many of those… 80% of the time it doesn’t work. I know this was very frustrating for me as nothing was working for me and nothing provided a perfect solution for *BOTH* Media Center and the streaming during gameplay using Windows Media Connect through WMP11.

So with some work and some thought, I came up with a solution last night which is working PERFECTLY for both Media Center *AND* WMC.

Here’s the thought process that got me to this theory… how does one make a local drive out of a network share? I don’t mean a mapped drive, I mean a full on, seen by Vista (or XP MC2005) honest to goodness hard disk without actually having it installed? iSCSI. 🙂

After doing some digging around on google, I was able to find several vendors out there (some free) that carried iSCSI Target software that could map local hard drives to iSCSI shares. I’m currently doing some testing with a couple of them but my first attempt actually backed up my theory right off using a trial version of RocketDivision’s StarWind. Windows Vista Ultimate comes with Microsoft’s iSCSI Initiator, so there was nothing to install for me on the client side. If you’re running a version of Windows that doesn’t have it, click the link and it should take you to their download. So far, so good. Now to just find something that will work that doesn’t cost my first born. 🙂 My hopes are that Nimbus will release a new version of their MySan product which will work with Windows Server 2003 SP2 since their current version only works on SP1 w/ .NET 2.0. Not downgrading just to test so here’s hoping to a quick release of 1.0 which I was told in a support ticket should be “very soon”.

The nice thing about iSCSI, as any server administrator who has a SAN knows, it links up at bootup so the drive is available system-wide and not limited to just one profile.

At this time, since I stated I’m testing, I’m unable to type up any instructions but I just wanted to blog out that there was a solution that is solid. As soon as I’m done I’ll post up with some instructions.

There is hope! 🙂

Not too shabby… about 2 weeks turn around time during the holiday season at that!

I think Amanda was a bit more stoked than I was about having it back to be honest… To quote her text messages today:

“The xbox just got here!” and “Yay we finally have it back. I have missed it.”

Now how many other women do you know that would say that!? Gotta love her!

I think she digs it mainly for the DDR, Scene-It and it’s ability to play any media we have in the house, lol.

With that being said we’ve run into a little snag with how things work with that. While the Xbox was gone we did an upgrade which is causing me some grief. I installed Small Business Server 2003 into the house and placed all the drive arrays on the main server instead of the desktop…. *sigh* Now the Xbox can’t see any of the music, pictures or video…. I will figure it out but it’s a bit disappointing to say the least. I’m not going to move the drive arrays as there has to be some solution out there. For now at least we can play games and watch DVD’s again, lol.

The nice thing about SBS in the house is having the Exchange server. I know, it’s “geeky” to have one in your house, but all the functionality it gives for email and the ability to archive and back it up properly is awesome. That and the file server is actually stable again. So all in all it’s nice.

We finished up the spare room downstairs… I’ll have to post up some pictures later though when I have some time. It turned out really nice in the end despite some electrical issues that had to be worked out. (read: travis was being stupid). The desktop has been moved in there to keep it safe while I cause havoc in the family room over the next couple of months… *grin* I can’t wait to get that room done.

Anyway, things to do.

well if you haven’t noticed… the references for the site are now referencing travis.sarbin.net …

story behind this…  godaddy rocks. 🙂

i was setting in motion some transfers to start getting all my domains listed and managed in one location… i’m so sick of going to several sites to manage my domains so why not? well… while i was there i pondered the thought of purchasing a couple domains and there ya have it… so the new blogsite address is http://travis.sarbin.net (amanda’s is http://amanda.sarbin.net) and we’ve also got her another domain name for working on her new website she’ll be posting up and publishing to within the next month or so… smandy.net… hehe she’ silly but ya gotta love her.

also with the addition of some domains, we’ve done some computer upgrades around the house too… aside from the new 22″ widescreen we use for the desktop now, we’ve upgraded the main computer and the server… now running SBS 2003 so we’re using exchange for all our email now. it’s actually quite nice … point-click management although we’re still using the FreeBSD servers for the main mail filtering/relaying. (you didn’t really think I’d leave my favorite OS behind now did you?)

with that said… we’ll also be moving the FreeBSD servers sometime in the next couple of months to a new co-location facility here in the Denver area. during that time email will still work fine but the websites/blogsites will be down for a few hours. nothing major, but fun none the less.

anyway… duty calls. 🙂