A few months back, I started looking into the Microsoft Windows Home Server platform, but had to step away. The biggest issue at the time was trying to enable remote access to my WHS box. Once I moved from DSL to FiOS, that problem went away. Since I’m now on a Mac diet and only using Windows – XP and the final build of Windows 7 — now is a good time to return to WHS. So this weekend, while I was re-installing Windows 7 in a dual-boot situation on my Toshiba NB205 netbook, I pulled double duty and got back on the WHS project. Boy, am I happy I did.
As I mentioned, my remote access challenge disappeared now that I have a FiOS connection that I’ve rewired for a direct pipe in my home office. Armed with a 20Mbps upload speed and the ability to access my WHS from a browser on any computer, I decided to start with consolidating my music. We have several computers in the house, each with its own music library. Today, I gathered all of the MP3 files we license and copied them all to the Data partition of the WHS box. Shortly, I’ll add all of the PCs to the WHS so that they’re all accessible, managed and backed up on a regular basis.
Now that we have all of our audio files in a shared folder on a central server, I decided to look into remote streaming. We could simply use a PC and download or play tunes in Windows Media Center, but I want something a little more fluid. After a little research, I found an add-in for WHS called Firefly Media Server. Apparently, it was first developed to stream music from iTunes or a Roku SoundBridge device, but it continues to evolve. I installed it as a service on my WHS machine, which then scanned the shared Music folder and built a local database of the music files. That was half of the effort. The other half was to install the Fireplay add-in, which is essentially a web server that serves up MP3 files to any Flash-supported browser. Once installed, I simply pointed the browser on my netbook to http://my.domain.com/Fireplay/ — obviously, I used my own personal WHS domain — and I had a Flash-based media player for my music.
Unfortunately, this solution won’t work for mobile browsers that don’t support Flash. That means I’m not yet at the point where I can remotely stream music from home to either my Palm Pre or iPhone. There are cloud-based solutions for this, but I’ll be looking into how I can provide a solution that lets me have total control over my data. I’d rather not store my music online if I can simply store and serve it from home.
I’ll be continuing down the Windows Home Server path and sharing the journey along the way. If you have any questions, suggestions or ideas about how to extend my WHS experience, I’m all ears, as usual!

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