Back in May of this year I retired my old home server that I put together back in 2009. It was built around a small form factor Asus T3-P5G31 system with an Intel Pentium Dual-Core E5200 and 4GB of RAM. Running Microsoft's original Windows Home Server and Small Business Server (running in a VM for Exchange), before being later upgraded to Windows Server 2012 Essentials.

I decided this time I'd rather go for a more standard case for the new server, but I still wanted it small and compact, so I opted for a mini-ITX case (with 6 drive bays!) made up of the following:

• Fractal Design Node 304 case
• AMD Ryzen 5 3600 CPU
• MSI B450I Gaming Plus AC mini-ITX motherboard
• 16GB of Crucial Ballistix 3200 MHz RAM
• Asus GeForce GT 710
• Noctua NH-U12S cooler

The system is running Windows Server 2016 Essentials on an old 256GB SSD I had lying around, with 3x 3TB mechanical hard drives that I moved from the old server, two in a mirrored Storage Space for data, and one for server and client backups. Handles the Essentials role of Windows Server brilliantly. Runs dedicated servers for the games; Ark Survival Evolved, Minecraft and Terraria without a hiccup too, as well as a bunch of various test VMs.

Despite being pretty jammed in there, the two 90mm intake fans, 140mm exhaust and the tower cooler on the CPU keep the system quiet and cool. Let's hope it last 11 years like the last system! If I have a spare modular PSU at some point that'll replace the cheap thing I threw in there so I can at least reduce the cable mess slightly, the PSU is actually the loudest thing in the case - so it will get swapped out when I have a better one. Any questions? Drop a comment below.

One of the issues I ran into this week involved Windows Server Essentials 2016, and the websites it creates as part of the Essentials role in IIS. All of which started returning an HTTP Error 501.19. This can also manifest as the connector software failing to connect, with the error "Cannot get information from 'servername'. Please contact your system administrator."

This also coincided with WSUS being temporarily installed and removed from the server for unrelated testing. It seems however that removing the WSUS role doesn't quite put the IIS configuration back to how the Essentials role sets it up, annoyingly the repair tool also fails to repair it.

Checking the file structure and permissions seemed to reveal nothing unusual, upon checking the IIS config however it looks like WSUS turns on Xpress HTTP compression, which in turn seems to break many if not all of the Essentials features. Running the following command on the server will remove it from IIS config, and after restarting IIS the Essentials roles are working properly again.

%windir%\system32\inetsrv\appcmd.exe set config -section:system.webServer/httpCompression /-[name='xpress']

An issue I've run into earlier this week involved the Chromium-based new Edge version 84 in this case, failing to launch when running via any shortcuts with the error message:

The application has failed to start because its side-by-side configuration is incomplete. Please see the application event log or use the command-line sxstrace.exe tool for more detail.

If you navigate to the Edge install folder, on my system this is: C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft\Edge\Application\ and check for a new-msedge.exe, and try running that. This seems to have resolved the issue. It looks like Edge was partially through updating itself when this was caused, possibly due to a crash or the system turning off while the update was being performed. Running new-msedge.exe seems to finish the update, it replaced the existing msedge.exe and removed itself.

A number of people have messaged me asking why the Windows 10 May 2019 update is not being shown on Windows Update, despite a lot of the technology press saying its been available for several weeks.

It's being gradually rolled out, so not everyone can get it straight away. Learning lessons from the 1809 update which was broadly made available very rapidly and was actively being pushed to machines far faster than previous updates. Which some argued was too aggressive especially considering there were a number of critical issues with the update around data loss in very specific scenarios.

In the past clicking on Check for updates in Windows Update would generally make a feature update install, Microsoft referred to these users as "seekers" as they were actively seeking for the update by clicking on Check for updates in Windows Update. For the May 2019 update (also referred to as 1903 or 19H1) this method doesn't seem to be as effective as in the past.

If you're keen to get the update installed now you can however use the Windows 10 Update Assistant to grab the update for you now and install it.

This guide will walk you through using the ResetDRM.exe tool successfully on Windows 8. Out of the box it isn't officially supported, but after re-installing Windows 8.1 a few weeks ago I noticed my Zune / Xbox Music pass music wasn't playing - not the stuff already downloaded nor streaming. So I had to find a way to get it working.

Zune was throwing a couple of different errors codes including C00D11CD and C00D2721. Windows Media Player was also effected, pretty good indication for whatever reason the DRM system on the machine was frazzled. My likely candidate was my RAM being overclocked by about 30% during installation, which did throw a few errors.

Presumbily if you've found this walkthrough you've already got the ResetDRM tool, if not you can download it from the Microsoft website. A quick glance at the tool showed it to be a self-extracting cabinet file.

I used WinRAR to have a look inside, but WinZip or similar tools would also open it up, this can be simply done by dragging it onto WinRAR.

From here what we need to do is extract it somewhere, just dragging the files onto the desktop will do the trick.

Next we need an elevated command prompt, which on Windows 8.1 is as simple as right-clicking the Start button and choosing Command Prompt (Admin).

From here we just need to run it, we'll also use the -v option. If you extracted it to your desktop you can run it by typing the following:

%userprofile%\desktop\cleandrm.exe -v

And then hit enter. That should successfully run the tool.

A couple of weeks back I started the upgrade from Windows Home Server to Windows Server 2012 Essentials. I never bothered moving to Windows Home Server 2011, the lack of Drive Extender was the deal breaker for me. But with WHSv1 falling out of support, it had to be done, that plus all the drives were almost full, which was having a noticeable impact on performance sometimes, so time to do something about it. Plus getting something a bit more modern was much desired!

For background I put together the current box from an Asus T3-P5G31 around 2008 or 2009, does the job nicely, small and compact. Only downside is there's only space for two 3.5 inch drives, I have a third in the 5 1/4 inch bay. I was running it with a 1TB, 1.5TB and 2TB drives.

First up Windows Server 2012 Essentials isn't cheap, it is insanely expensive to use as a home server, at around ten times the price of WHSv1. But as someone who has run a server at home since Windows 2000, hosting commercially successful websites from it, along with Small Business Server 2003, just so I could get push e-mail to my phone, it was more a returning to the norm. But undoubtedly the price is a deal breaker, the product is clearly aimed at the small business.

I ordered two Western Digital Red 3TB drives to go along with it. There was mixed opinion on the internet as to if the board with its ICH7 controller would support 3TB drives. So I ordered a Transcend PDC3 SATA board, to add 2 more SATA ports, and definite support for 3TB drives, if the on-board controller didn't. Also added 2 USB 3 ports, juicy bonus, or so I thought, more on that later.

Before doing the install, I backed up all the data onto one of the 3TB drives by plugging it into another machine and copying everything over the network. Data safe, ready to go to work.

I ended up installing the system on an old 500GB drive I had lying around, then using the two 3TB drives to mirror data on the server - I ran into a setback when Storage Spaces had to wipe the data from a drive to use it in a Storage Space - d'oh, so I had to copy the data to another drive, and then back again after creating the Storage Space - adding about 20 hours to the process.

I then used the 2TB and 1.5TB drives together in a simple volume to hold File History backups, and also image-based backups. So yes, I have two drives sticking out of the case, but I needed the storage. Alternatively you could run with USB drives in nice tidy enclosures, but I don't need tidy.

I had already tested it out in virtual machines so had few unexpected surprises. It installed without a hitch.

By default the connector software joins the client machines to the domain, I don't need this and run my home network as a workgroup, there is a workaround. Run the following on an elevated command prompt before installing the connector software:

reg add "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows Server\ClientDeployment" /v SkipDomainJoin /t REG_DWORD /d 1

Boom, joins the computer without messing with your local user profiles. It installs the Launchpad and Dashboard software, and away you go basically.

I however ran into some issues. The largest of which was the server becoming unresponsive after about 12 hours, upon closer inspection it seemed the Transcend SATA card's USB driver had a memory leak! Luckily I'm not using the USB ports, so I disabled the driver. This is something you should be aware of if you're using this card in a similar setup.

The following minor issue is the connector installation adds a service that periodically changes your DNS servers to your server, if you need to prevent this from happening you can disable the service (Windows Server LAN configuration).

Lastly clients seemed to forget their network credentials every session, this would prevent File History from running unless you accessed the server and entered them again - it seems the Launchpad software changes the credentials from permanent to session only. Disabling the Launchpad software resolves this - there seem to be no major side effects - backups still run normally, but you lose server alerts, or trigger backups manually from the client (you can still do it via the Dashboard) - no big deal in my opinion. Presumably this is a side effect of running as a workgroup rather than a domain.

All in all no major problems, just be aware it is way more expensive, and way more complicated to setup, well relative to Windows Home Server, certainly not compared to older versions of Windows Server. But alas it seems the Home Server market has been abandoned by Microsoft, however Windows 8 Pro does support Storage Spaces, so using Windows 8 on a home server isn't unreasonable, in fact it's very possible.

And yes my Terraria and Freelancer servers continue to operate normally from it!