There's no tldr; on this one. This is one of the 3 defining IT/computer events of my life (Windows XP Media Center Edition and some games in the mid-90s being the other 2). Read it and you might learn more about me.
For a short while Microsoft released a product called "Windows Home Server". It had a short lifespan of only a few years, but it offered a lot of services normal in the SMB product range, but for relatively cheap at home. In fact, HP even released some computers with this installed as retail products.
It allowed for backups, remote access to files and other things that very few users would want in their homes...unless they were me, of course.
In some ways the product was a lot like a stripped-down version of the Server Essentials product, which itself is like s stripped-down version of regular Windows Server. The differences being that Home Server & Server Essentials had a GUI walk you through setting a lot of these features up, in a much easier way than the normal Windows Server product.
Around 2009 I'd converted to a TiVo and relegated my monster DVR to spare parts and/or gave some of it to roommates who had needs for parts of their own. I had access to Windows Home Sever in my Action Pack subscription from Microsoft and I decided to try it out.
There were a lot of really neat features that allowed for basic user and file management, remote access to the files and performing backups of other Windows-based computers. As a prolific computer-builder-who-then-replaces-it-with-something-else-to-scratch-a-new-itch I realized the value in the file sharing and backups immediately, as my computers changed frequently or were at least tinkered with frequently.
A really cool thing though was that you could pick a domain name for your Home Server that would let you log in from a web browser remotely and download some files. I forget the name of the domain, but if we use "HomeServer.Microsoft.com" as an example you could set your server to "Nate.HomeServer.Microsoft.com". That was a really neat feature that I barely used.Â
This was mostly an exercise that expanded my thinking about what computers were meant for and could do in the home. Sure, many people have little servers on their Raspberry Pie's or small computers like the ones ServeTheHome talks about in their "Tiny Mini Micro" series, but this long predates these modern, smaller products and definitely had much less utility than the average homelab these days.
There were two features that kind of blew my mind at the time, which were the Drive Expander & Remote Access Gateway features.
Drive Expander allowed you to add more drives and allocate their capacity to the storage pool. It allowed JBOD disk expansion and deduplication of your files, which is pretty common in products like BTRFS in Synologys or with Unraid, but was pretty uncommon back then. I'm still using JBOD disks on my Unraid server to this day, and the flexibility is wonderful for casual use server storage.
Reamote Access Gateway let you log into the puclic URL of your server and RDP into one of your home computers. This was almost as cool as the terminal server we had for the Boston folks at work! I definitely did not test it from work and access Eve Online in order to set more skills for training. I definitely did not do that at all, not for my own scientific research or for any other reason.
In the second version of Home Server Microsoft dropped the Drive Expander feature, which kind of killed this project for me. I was less interested in setting up RAID arrays as I did not have enough matching disks to do so. And I also had built this in a small Shuttle chassis with a Core2Quad and as much RAM as I could fit. I only had enough physical space for a couple of hard drives and as this wasn't my daily driver PC, and I had it stored in a small area at home, I didn't want to get a larger chassis.
These days I have backup services, VPN, file sharing, a bunch of dockers & some Minecraft servers all running on various pieces of hardware at home, and understanding that services like these were possible at home started with my Windows Home Server project.