TapiRex 1.7.3 released: This free update to TapiRex fixed some issues with the reverse lookup and the API.
We recommend updating to this version. Your existing license keys from previous orders are still valid in this new version. The changelog lists all changes and improvements.
Please download the newest version from the downloadpage.
On our search for a good file server and centralized backup solution, I stumbled across Windows Home Server. The description sounds very good and seemed to be the perfect solution for our office: this server system automatically backs up Windows clients over night and has a unique data-storage system, which makes it possible to add and remove different harddrives to the storage, making it larger without the hassle of moving files from one drive to the other. It’s a kind of software raid (stripe).
It also comes with a handy administration console, which can be accessed from every client machine. This console can be extended easily with addins by third party software developers. As some TapiRex customers already asked about a Windows Home Server console addin for TapiRex, it was a good point to get started trying this new Windows Server operating system.
So I tried to find it in the MSDN Subscriber downloads, as we have several subscriptions to MSDN Universal, which theoretically includes all Microsoft operating systems and all other software. As I was unable to find a download there, I googled the web and found out that Microsoft decided not to make Windows Home Server available in MSDN Subscriber downloads. Urgh. So we pay lots of money to not be able to get access to a Windows operating system to develop new addons for it. What a decision…
So I just ordered a Windows Home Server license from eBay, which was delivered quickly and did only cost around 90 Euros.
Installation
When installing the Windows Home Server incl. Power Pack 1 (which is based on Windows 2003 Server) on one of our servers in our server rack, it stumbled upon our 3Ware RAID controller, which is installed with 2 x 160GB harddrives as system drives in a mirrored array to speed up the operating system. I was able to load additional drivers for that controller from an USB stick, but when the system rebooted after the first installation step, it has forgotten about the driver.
Googling for this issue, I had to find out that this is a bug in the Windows Home Server installation 
. As the text-based setup does not have access to a USB stick to reload the drivers, I had to go out to buy an external 3.5″ USB disk drive, as the setup only accepts additional drivers from the A: drive. Do you remember 3.5″ disks? It was not that easy to find a disk to store the driver to get past this installation step. These disks have gone so rare here in the office 
. Previous installations of Windows 2003 did not have this problem…
But after that, setup was pretty easy. I was able to install all hardware components and to setup the Drive Extender. After setup, you have to install a small client connector software on every client machine that should backup to that Windows Home Server, which was pretty easy as well.
In-day-usage
The good thing is that the backups worked pretty well. Also, some of the available plugins from third-party developers are very useful.
But there also were some problems:
Delays in accessing shared folders: we experienced some delays in accessing shared folders on the server. Every employee in the office has some drives mapped to shared folders on the file server. This includes a personal folder and some general folders for everyone. While browsing in these subfolders on these drives, there was sometimes a lag of several seconds that makes it impossible to work with it fluently. For example, we store our downloads company-wide in a folder on the file-server. But the “save file” dialog in the webbrowser sometimes hung up for up to 20 seconds before it was able to show the folder and save the file. Once the data transfer starts, it’s fast and reliable.
Bug in drive’s size-calculation: When you map shared folders on the Windows Home Server as local drives, Windows XP and Vista are unable to show the correct drive size. After searching the web and asking some experts in Windows Home Server forums, I found out that this a known bug in Windows Home Server and that you can’t do anything about it:
Popups on all client machines: when you have the client connector software installed, all warnings from the Windows Home Server or one of it’s clients is shown on every client machine. So every user gets popup messages like “Computer X does not have virus protection installed”, “Backup on machine Y was not sucessful”, and many more. I was not able to find a way to customize these popups so that there are not shown to our apprentices for example.
So, after nearly 2 weeks in production, I am currently installing Windows 2008 Datacenter on that server machine, as the problems shown above disturbed our daily workflow that much that it was not worth it. We will install Windows Home Server as a VMWare virtual machine instead to do some software development on it. A PamFax addon is also an idea for it. What do you think?
I will report back how this all worked with Windows 2008. Does anyone have a different suggestion for a solid and fast file server operating system + client backup possibilities?
- The PamFax Windows Vista Sidebar Gadget was just published to the Windows Live gallery (see PamFax Gadget details page). Give it a try and experience a complete new feeling and comfort of sending faxes.
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In the next three days, Dick and myself will be in Athens, Greece at the Skype Developer Days 2008. This is a great yearly event and always a great opportunity to meet the Skype staff and a lot of interesting people working with Skype. After Prague, Czech Republic back in 2007 and Tallin, Estland in 2006, we are really looking forward to visit Athens this year for this event.
- TapiRex updated: We finally managed to update TapiRex to version 1.7.2. This update fixes some problems like the error message after wakeup, reverse lookup in Canada, …
Just download and install the newest version from the downloadpage.
We also started an experiment with Open Source: the next version of mceTapiRex has been published as Open Source. We have uploaded the complete source code of the current development version of mceTapiRex V2 to CodePlex: Open mceTapiRexV2 on CodePlex. We hope that many developers join us to develop this very nice TapiRex plugin to the next stage. If this works well, we can start thinking of making other components of the TapiRex system open source…
Our callerID-notification tool TapiRex was updated to version 1.7.1. This update improves the communication between the server and the clients and the reverse lookup for contacts.
Also available is now a free plugin for reverse lookup in your Google contacts. This plugin was built by Thomas Ardal using the free TapiRex SDK (see http://www.codeplex.com/trexgooglecontacts). We hope that more users and companies follow this example and add more functionalities to TapiRex. We are more then happy to help you with that if you want to.
The license keys from previous orders are still valid in this new version. To update TapiRex, just download the latest version from our website and run the setup without uninstalling any previous TapiRex first. Be sure to say “No” in the installation when it asks to replace the file “data.mdb” to keep your call-history. The call-history and all settings will then be available in the new TapiRex as well.
Visit TapiRex site or visit the download page to download TapiRex.
TapiRex was updated to version 1.6: this version contains some improvements in stability and handling. For example, Outlook contacts are now buffered in TapiRex so that access to them is much faster now.
We have also added a TapiRex API so that every software developer can use some of the functionalities from TapiRex in his own software (do something on a call, start calls, …). We are looking forward to your cool plugins to TapiRex. Just contact us if you need a helping hand on how to start a TapiRex plugin….
