Chapter 7. Touring the Console

You may not think of servers as user friendly. In fact, if you think of them at all you probably think of them as those computers hidden away in your company's data center, and maintained by IT techs specially trained in the arcane knowledge of the commands necessary to keep them running smoothly.

In developing a Home Server product, Microsoft has sought to change all of that. They knew that the key to creating a successful Home Server product was to make it easy enough for anybody to use. The most visible aspect of this decision is the program they created to easily manage all aspects of the server. This program is the Windows Home Server Console.

The console is accessible from any Windows computer connected to your network, or directly from the server's desktop. You can even access it from anywhere over the Internet if you so desire. The goal of this chapter is to give you an overview of the Console, while touching on some of the major features of Windows Home Server that can be managed from it. Later chapters go into more detail concerning these Home Server features.

Launching the Console

You can launch the Console from the server's desktop, but more often than not you will probably launch it from one of the computers on which you've installed the Connector. When you install the Connector, it installs an icon in your system ...

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