ok the night before last i ordered a EX495 from amazon on the sly while the wife wasn't paying attention Yesterday i received the new server and began setting it up (on the sly) of course. Over night i let the media collector find my music and pictures, and when i woke up this morning the server had done it's job beautifully.

Now comes the video conversion, let me preface by telling a short story. years ago my wife and i had a video camera that recorded to tape, a Sony handycam. Recently she brought the tapes to our local camera shop to have the videos converted to disk. When we got the disks from the camera store and reviewed they're work we were extremely disappointed, all they did was take the video and create a bunch of still shots mashed it all together into one big slide show, put music to it and called it a video. My wife was pissed !! In an attempt to make my life more tolerable by making her happy, i extracted the .vob files from the disk onto my hard drive, at some point in the future i was going to try to fix this issue........yeah right! Thus we get to enabling the video conversion on the new EX495. Again it does it's job great, it found the .vob files on the client machine and converted them to individual mp4's of the movies that were originally on the video tape of the handycam. In other words it's EXACTLY what my wife wanted originally.....now what do i say to her? "Honey look what id did for you" She doesn't even know about the new server.

Sorry to be so long winded, i guess all i was trying to say is, so far, so good on the new EX495. I have also read alot about the iPhone not connecting to EX485's using HPs' iStream app from the iTunes app store. This app does work with the 495, i struggled most of last night and a portion of today to get this app to connect to my server. Finally, in the "server" field of the app i simply entered my "internet" ip, no https, or http://www., the app then connected without any errors. this also worked with a local ip as well.

The new EX495 looks to be a promising machine, i loved my 1st generation MSS but this one definitely looks better so far. << I guess i stated the obvious there.

Great to hear your experience, thanks for sharing!

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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?

I know how you feel. I just got done transferring all my data from my old server to the EX495. I had no idea it was really that small! Now if that 1.5GB second drive I ordered would get here... Though, my wife does know about the new box. I haven't played with the video conversion yet, too busy migrating 500GB of files.

Ditto! I received my EX495 about 5:00 p.m. yesterday and got things transferred over while I slept. Note that I did not do the Server Recovery as Alex has documented - too chicken after reading about poor Damian's problems with Shawshank!

So far everything seems to run just fine aside from Remote Access. This seems to be a TZO issue that refuses to allow me to transfer my domain name. I have a support request into them and I suspect that it'll be resolved on Monday. Overall, the server is much snappier than my old EX475. I have not yet turned on teh media collector or tried converting any videos, but I'm sure to get to that this week.

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X510 w/7 TB (100% WD Green EARS)
Stock Processor, 4 GB Memory Upgrade

Great to hear. I should say I think my server recovery issues had a lot to do with me doing a DIY build. From reading Alex's writeup it appears that it is probably a lot more foolproof doing a server recovery within the HP/MSS infrastructure. Congrats on the new server. Definitely share your thoughts if you think t he upgrade was worth it

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Cheers,
Damian

DIY WHS - 12.5TB and growing, too many gadgets to list

Did you read the MediaSmartServer blog today?
Blog - http://www.adigitalhomeblog.com
"Like a midget at a urinal, stay on your toes!" - Lieutenant Frank Drebin

Right, the MSS image has all the drivers built in and so the process is much smoother than the ordeal Damian has been working through.

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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?

You know I just did this and when I read your post I tried the remote access from work (5 minutes ago) and it worked fine. When I set the TZO up I just typed in my custom domain name and I entered my TZO login/account name and password. Of course it took me to the renew/buy screen but I exited out of that. After I entered my TZO login it found my account and updated my service expiration date (it moved up one month - don't know what that is about but it worked).

Yea, TZO was great and they fixed this last night (great folks who work on a Sunday night.) Anyway, Alex pinged it for me and could not get the name to resolve. So, I may still have a bug. However, he tried it shortly after the fix was made, so perhaps his DNS was not yet updated. I need to try again later today.

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X510 w/7 TB (100% WD Green EARS)
Stock Processor, 4 GB Memory Upgrade