WARNING! Windows Home Server Vail Preview is an early test build of the next version of Windows Home Server. As such, it is not in any way, shape, or form ready for you to MOVE any important data from your current Windows Home Server (or other machine) to a Vail powered machine. Doing so without proper backups elsewhere may put that data at great risk of being lost forever.
In addition, certain features you see may *not* be in the released version. Certain features you do *not* see *may* be incorporated in the released version.
OK, you’ve downloaded the Vail Beta. You’ve burned an Install DVD. You’ve installed the Vail Beta. You’ve installed the Connector on your workstation/notebook/netbook. You can now connect to your Vail Server and manage the machine from your computer.
The question is, what do you want to manage? Well, from Microsoft’s point of view, everything. This is a Beta. They want you to break it. They want you to bring it to its knees. Then tell them about it. That’s the point of a Beta and you are now part of the great Vail Experiment.
One area that you may or may not ever have to visit, at least when Vail becomes your production machine is Users. Of course, if you want to view the Shared Folders, or remotely access your Vail machine from the Internet, you really have no choice! So let’s take a look at User Management and Vail’s folder security controls.
User Management
To add users to the home server, fire up the Dashboard,
move over to the Users tab, then click on that “Add a user account” next to the green cross.
In the Add a User Account wizard, fill in the user’s first and last name – Vail will suggest a user name, but you can create your own if you wish. Enter a password, taking note of the password security rules, then we can move on to access rights.
Vail’s Shared Folders will be listed, and you can choose whether that user has full access (read/write), read only access or no access to each of those shared folders. With that completed, you can then control remote access for that user. This determines what areas of the home server each user can access remotely, including Shared Folders, connected computers (remote desktop), streaming media (music, videos and photos), links on your homepage (which you may wish to keep private) and the Server dashboard.
With all that configured, Vail will configure the account.
Once back in the dashboard, you will now find a User entry. The user is now allowed access to the nominated Shared Folders and if permitted, access the server remotely from the Internet.
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