It's time for this site to end. I've kept it up for many years after the MSS and WHS were discontinued, as a resource for the community. These days the majority of traffic is spam and AI bots scraping content, with little genuine user interaction. The software running the site is incredibly old at this point and not worth upgrading. I hate to lose all the knowledge and resources contained here, it's definitely the end of an era.

So at some point in the coming weeks (almost certainly before the end of the year), I'll be taking the site down, along with RemoteNotification.com, and closing the LLC I had formed to run these ventures under.

I've loved this community we built, thank you all for your participation!

_________________
Alex Kuretz
Remote Notification: Monitoring and alerting for your Home Server via email, Twitter, text message, RSS, push notifications, and on your Mac desktop
Have you tried our Add-Ins?

Hi Alex,

I knew it was inevitable at some point that keeping this forum open would become burdensome. I'd love to back it up for future reference as I doubt everything is up on wayback machine.

Any suggestions if there's software out there that would allow me to save everything locally to my little MSS.

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Hi All, Thanks to everyone for your continued effort to keep the MSS & WHS alive. Haven't registered yet? Please do so the moderators know your here!

ex49x/v1 (toyin w/Vail)
VGA
Q8200s w/two 30mm cooling fans
4gb Ram
Rear Casecover Cooling Mod

Before you end up deleting this website please consider backing it up. protoweb would be a good idea. if you don't know what protoweb is then here is a short description form there website. Protoweb is a community-driven public service that hosts historical Internet websites to demonstrate the Internet in its early days. Its goal is to rebuild and restore early Internet services to offer a seamless browsing experience. It is a proxy server that can be accessed with many web browsers and hosts countless web sites with live weather, news, music, games and downloads. I use it on my Windows 98 PC. That's why I have a HP mediasmart server. For my retro computers.

Update, Update, Update.
Cyotek has been running for 10 days, it is done @ 10 gigs. I will test it tomorrow and see what I have.

This download is not working, the website is in Php and cyotek does not know what to do with the data.
But, I tried Httrack for just the forums " which is the important part for me" and it is working great and is only 2.25 gig...

Thx Alex....
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Hey Guys/Girls. I knew this day would come. So sad. Still using my X-510 everyday.

As far as the Program I used to have to copy a website, well, I deleted it " cleaning house " but found this instead and am making a copy right now.
https://www.cyotek.com/cyotek-webcopy
Also found this one as well:
https://www.httrack.com/page/2/en/index.html

I can see a lot of bad links " which may be part of the reason why Alex is shutting it down" But I will grab what I can.
Looks like it may take 4-6 hours and file size will be somewhere around a gig. But worth it.

Disclaimer, I have not used the app before and have no idea if it will work, but am trying it.
If the site is still up when I am done, I will report back.

Hopefully Alex might be able to find a new home for it. But @ 65 years old, I understand you can't keep this stuff going forever.
I have been label making passwords on all the pc/servers around the house and have tried to teach my daughter as much as I can.

I have the server backed up to another server, maybe she can buy a Synology and transfer all the data to that. Will be easier for her and her mother.

Huge thank you to everybody and Thank you so very much to Alex for making the best home server EVER and the best website to go with it.......
God bless to all.

_________________
[X510 CPU/RAM/All 2 TB Red's] [X510 CPU/Sync'ed Backup/All 2 TB Hitachi's]
[X510 /2 in box]
[X710 LIAN LI DIY W2016E] Stablebit Drivepool [EX-503 LIAN LI 5-bay USB3 External]
Fear the Cloud

Hi Guardian,

I took some time and dug a bit and found a post from 2019 where you said at the time that httrack was what you were using to back the site up. I used it once or twice, but it seemed kinda kludgy. It doesn't look like it's had an update since 2017 either.

It would be great to hear how you get on with Cyotek web copy.

_________________
Hi All, Thanks to everyone for your continued effort to keep the MSS & WHS alive. Haven't registered yet? Please do so the moderators know your here!

ex49x/v1 (toyin w/Vail)
VGA
Q8200s w/two 30mm cooling fans
4gb Ram
Rear Casecover Cooling Mod

I must say it is truly sad to see it go. I authored many articles outlining Hardware upgrade procedures and mods for the different MediaSmart servers, and the Mediavaults platforms too.

Hp had a great product that really lasted the test of time. Even today my old EX495 running WHS2011 x64 with upgraded Q9950 processor can still do a number of things better then the QNAP TVS473 NAS I replaced it with. But like with many things in our life technology moves on. As a result many of the devices we use become obsolete and no longer maintainable and interest is lost as they get shelved or retired.

My thanks to all that took their time to enrich our hobby by sharing their knowledge. My best to the founders, donators, Moderators and owners of this site. I will always have a fond memory of the time I spent working with and upgrading these platforms and sharing with my friends here.

All good things come to an end, my best to you all, I am sure the little black box will always have a favorite spot in our hearts. Thanks for providing such a great platform for us hobbiest and computer nerds.

Cheers and a happy long life to you all as you ride off into the sunset!

Thank you for the many years of this community site! As you'll see I registered here long ago, and this site and other resources related to the MediaSmart really helped me out with my EX475 back in the day. I remember getting the VOV Technology VGA adapter (might've been thru here, unsure), installing Linux on it, and doing a good bit of stuff with it! I recently dug it up again and wound up also getting back into my account here.

I'm glad that I happened to pop by before the site goes down for good, but it's sad to see it go! Best wishes to you all.

_________________
MediaSmart EX47x SMI USB Recovery Files HERE!

@Guardian,

I wasn't expecting Cyotek to take so long either, I started my back up the day before Christmas, and it's only backed up 2.27 GB so far. I think I'll follow your lead and use httrack today to start a forum back up

_________________
Hi All, Thanks to everyone for your continued effort to keep the MSS & WHS alive. Haven't registered yet? Please do so the moderators know your here!

ex49x/v1 (toyin w/Vail)
VGA
Q8200s w/two 30mm cooling fans
4gb Ram
Rear Casecover Cooling Mod

Just started mirroring the site too.. Really hope it will finish before you pull the plug. This has been an incredible resource for all things WHS&MSS

Well, phooey. I've not been very active here, but it has been a great resource for me and many others. The site has helped my keep my little server going for long after it's expiry date. I've recently bought a Windows 11 workstation and will be upgrading the OS on my MSS so that I can continue to use it as a media and backup server.

Thank you for the site. IT has been most helpful.

I too would like to thank all who contributed to this fantastic little site. Without it I would have not been able to continue keeping all of my WHS servers going in various guises. I still use a well 'pimped' EX490 for media serving running an L3360 low power Xeon and 24TB of disk storage both onboard and in an external enclosure.

I also shoe horned Windows 2019 and 2016 Essentials (Client backups for the win) together for a more modern software environment. I have several other chassis as spares and with PSU's hard to find it gets harder to keep going. The last one I had to resolder a few connections to make it work. I also have a couple of 12TB drives in the main enclosure and a 1TB SSD in the boot location now which work rather nicely.

The Ubuntu server still works but does less work now but I love the fact I managed to get the LED's to show status.

I really do hope the site can be "archived" somehow.

Cheers and Bon Voyage
Rip.

_________________
X510, Xeon Quad L3360 2.86GHz Server 2019 + Essentials 2016,SANS DIGITAL TR5M
EX490, E8400 Server 2019
EX490, E8600 WHS 2011
EX490, E8400 Ubuntu server 16.04
EX475 Athlon BE-2350 2.1GHz WHS v1

It's the end of an era



I remember seeing the little server back in - ohh - 2009 (don't remember). It was at a Microsoft Partner conference where it was displayed on a high table and I immediately fell in love.

I used it as the main server in the household, holding videos, movies and MP3 files.

I upgraded it to WHS2011 - headlessly... - but I was sad to see how much functionality was lost compared to version 1. Even the Disk-status lights weren't working correctly in WHS2011.

Eventually I replaced it with a Synology NAS, which later was replaced by a Windows Server build, which again was replaced with another Synology and then a MacOS server and then again a Synology and then again a Windows Server... OMG how I have been tinkering around.

But it all started with the little nice box with easy replacable drives.

Thanks for the site, @Alex Kuretz, and to everyone posting articles around this server.

Bjorn

I just found a thread from 2024 that will save me hours of pain trying to access my old WHS from newer machines.

Old tech isn't always for the garbage dump and I appreciate very much that I found the thread. I hope a copy of this entire server is available online for archival purposes... tons of useful info here

Had to find my password so I could login to say thank you for all of your help and dedication to the community

Best wishes for your next endeavors.

_________________
MSS 487 3X2.0,1X 250HDD SW2.5
JBOD 4.5tb
Main PC-WIN7 pro I7 3770K
netgear WNDR3800
Trendnet Gigabit switch
Networked receiver SC1222k
Roku XD player
1 HTPC- win7-32
2 HTPC WIn7 64 ( i5k i7)
Dell I5 note book

Really sad news to hear this site will be going away. This place is where I learned about servers many years ago. I have since moved on from the HP MediaSmart machine (I still have 3 of them!), but I still come back here for knowledge and information about windows servers. Just so many great users have contributed so much over the years. Thank you, Alex for all the great years and help. Without you I wouldn't be doing what I am doing today with servers.

I really hope the site will find a new home somewhere, and will continue to exists for many years to come.

All the best to you and yours, and everyone else who made this site a true wonder!

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Lenovo TS-440| 8GB| |13 int HD's| 2xSans Digital TR5M-B (10 HD's) | WHS 2011 | |Stablebit Drivepool |Stablebit Scanner| |FlexRAID 2.0|