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CES - Microsoft holds out on Home Server

10.01.2007
For the second year in a row, I'm braving the wilds of the , now in its 40th straight year. Again, I'm doing it on my own dime because InfoWorld enjoys torturing me just a little, which means I'm staying with and one of the Catholic Church's chief geeks, a Jesuit priest known only by his code name: Padre.

It's Day 2 of our CES experience. My feet hurt, Brian's cranky because he bought the Lenovo X41 mini-tablet when the X60 just came out with so much more cool stuff, and since the press room is more crowded than a Vegas stripper's bra, the free lunches ran out before we could get to them, which means I'm subsisting on wilted lettuce leaves and some beef jerky I stole out of Brian's knapsack.

But there was column fodder here and so I came. It's just that it took me two days to find Microsoft's booth. But once I did, it jumped right out at me: Microsoft Home Server ... Version 1. Yeah, it's real enough to be showing at a trade show. We plucked a Microsoftee out of the crowd to pick his brain on the topic, and the thing quickly took shape.

It's meant to run headless on an appliance -- something the family can stick in the closet downstairs. Once up, it sees all the PCs in your home and hooks to your broadband connection. It then does almost what you'd expect: One; it'll back up itself and your home PCs using Microsoft's backup service; two, it'll stream music and video from its hard disk to any PC; and three, it'll talk to various Windows Live services, including the Xbox's gaming network.

It was a nice little litany, but it left me with a number of questions that the unfortunate Microsftoid couldn't answer. For example: Why is it based on Windows Server 2003 and not Longhorn if Home Server isn't coming out till the second half of this year? Longhorn's better no matter how you slice it or how much you strip it down to fit into a home frame.

Why is there no perimeter Internet security? Home Server says it wants to enable remote access among other features, but it doesn't want to use Microsoft's VPN and has none of feature set. Why didn't Microsoft put together a home version of ISA that would have been able to handle that seamlessly? And speaking of security, why not an invisible version of WSUS (Windows Server Update Services) so that Home Server could download all your PCs' updates, store them, and the push them out during off hours?