Hey Andrew: Really cool. I have an older Media Smart, and am very happy with it. Another option for the Window-Eyes install on these boxes is to do the silent install, you'll get the same thing just not with as many key strokes Wineyes\setup.exe /vs /vn"name" /vc"company" This will do exactly what you did accept it will set the Dectalk as the default synth. So, when you run WE for the first time you can do alt+f, y, end, enter to get to the RDP setting, or alternatively, run wineyes.exe with the /smsvirtual commandline switch. The full computer restore CD uses Windows PE, so will never talk because PE has no audio stack. However, there is another restore option which might be workable I've not played with that yet. Using the console in the normal way, a user can view the backups for a computer, select restore and select a drive they want to restore. This will have the drive show up on their local machine in an Explorer window, and they can move around and just drag and drop files. I believe this actually calls a tool installed on the local machine called mountbackup.exe, and if I can figure out how that tool is called it might be possible to mount a backup as a drive without using the console. Overall, as I said, a very impressive and useful little box. I know of quite a few consultants who will buy these along with an SBS server and set them up in small businesses just to do relyable client backups since that's apparently something SBS doesn't do right now. Ryan -----Original Message----- From: blind-sysadmins-bounces@lists.hodgsonfamily.org [mailto:blind-sysadmins-bounces@lists.hodgsonfamily.org] On Behalf Of Andrew Hodgson Sent: Thursday, March 25, 2010 3:04 PM To: Blind sysadmins list Subject: [Blind-sysadmins] HP Datavault Home Server Hi, Had a lot of Dabs points left so picked up 3TB HP Datavault server with Windows Home Server on it. This is very similar to the MediaSmart server, only targeted at small businesses, but with the same software set as the MediaSmart server. The 3TB consists of 2 1.5 TB drives, grate - can consolidate two Buffalo Linkstations plus data on my SBS server onto this box. With Dabs points plus money off vouchers they keep sending me, the unit came in at about £680. I tried to get the MediaSmart server, but it wasn't available through Dabs at any rate. System is a dual-core Pentium (64-bit compatible for future proof, though current WHS is 32-bit). 2GB RAM installed. This box is very small - just over the size of a single drive Linkstation, and it runs very quiet. Lots of impressive lights on the front, very bright! As you may know the console on the WHS boxes is not accessible remotely since it uses some embedded RDP session. The workaround I made was to install WindowEyes 7.11 onto the box itself by using the Remote Desktop connection. I copied the CD contents to the d: drive of the server, then ran the setup program. It is important to choose the following - choosing the wrong option can put the server into an unrecoverable state, I did this and had to reimage the machine with the recovery disk! - Install with no speech. - Choose custom setup. - Enter your name. - Install to default directory. - Choose to use the RDP virtual redirector speech synth - not Dectalk! - No Braille display. - Don't install manual (does it matter?) - Choose default hotkey for startup. - Untick both boxes for WE autostart (very important). - After install completes, don't reboot the system, enable the RDP video chaining driver then reboot. Once the server is back up start WE on the local system, RDP into the WHS box and then start WE on there. You should get speech - the first thing you will get is a warning explaining that you shouldn't go messing around in the various different server consoles. If you run the WHS console from here (via desktop shortcut), you can do most of the items you want using the mouse cursors, including creating accounts etc. Outside the console you seem to be able to do a lot of server functions - i.e., install software, change IIS settings, etc. There is even the option to join the server to the domain, but apparently this isn't in the license agreement, so I didn't join my server to the SBS domain. I get the feeling that there is a lot of custom work on the server installed by both MS and HP, and if you change settings without knowing the workings of the custom software you will break stuff. I created user accounts which matched the passwords of my SBS account, and could access shares on the system fine. The backup feature is very impressive, backing up my Windows 7 machine in less than an hour. Restore unfortunately requires boot CD, so not going to be accessible. There is a remote access feature which is nice. You can remotely upload and download files from the server, and the HTML interface for this works well. You can choose to download whole directories, and you get them as a ZIP file. Uploading caused a bit of an issue for me, though I suspect I will use it mainly for downloading. It tries to get the remote access using UPNP, if you have something listening on a single static IP address on port 80 or 443 don't do this. They force a TZO dynamic DNS service on you, I just cancelled out of the setup for this and it seemed to work ok. There is a nice media converter on here for videos, put the video you want converting into a special share and it gets converted to MP4. There is also a media server running Twonky Media services for all those network players around. Windows Media services is obviously supported natively as well. HP have done the Mac integration piece for this as well, with a special Mac client and a Time Machine server pre-installed. Recovery is a bit of a pita, you have to connect directly to the PC (not using crossover cable interestingly enough), then press the recovery button as the unit starts. By the looks of it this asks the BIOS to boot from a PXE server which your recovery CD on the PC will set up. Once booted into the recovery environment, the wizard on the desktop guides you through reimaging the device. There are options to just reinstall the WHS partition, or to do a full format of the disks (factory reset). This just didn't work for me on my Win7 machine, so had to go and use my XP netbook to do the recovery. Overall am happy with this device, probably won't get another NAS device for ages now :). Apparently there are upgrades due out for the unit, and for older units there were paid upgrades to the latest WHS release, so am hoping they will have an upgrade option available for the next release due out early next year. Only issue with this is Windows domain support. Hope this helps. Andrew. _______________________________________________ Blind-sysadmins mailing list Blind-sysadmins@lists.hodgsonfamily.org http://lists.hodgsonfamily.org/mailman/listinfo/blind-sysadmins