Home Server Setup

Oooooh, something useful to put on my Developer blog!  Awesome!

So, I just moved my Dell PowerEdge 700 into the living room last night, hiding it behind my overly massive TV.  I long ago set it up to be a personal development server, but I abandoned the project in frustration last summer when I couldn't get a wireless card to work with it and Windows Server 2008.  I don't have enough power or space near the rest of my computers to leave it in proximity to the router, so I just shut the machine down and moved on without it.

Well, a few months back I bought a new pair of Sony Home Electronics (HDTV and BluRay player), both of which are network ready.  Neither had wifi built in, but they had ethernet jacks.  So, I got a 2 port Netgear wireless N bridge.  I've had it plugged into the TV and BluRay player up until now.  However, I never really use the internet features on the TV, because I don't have sound running from the TV to the surround sound.  I just use the BluRay player for all my network streaming, and it works out just fine.

I've begun work on a personal project, building a website for a local organization.  I need, at a minimum, a place to store my code (i.e. VSS at least, TFS at best).  Since the Dell already had Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 loaded up on it, and it was just sitting there anyway, I went ahead and moved it to the alcove behind the TV, fired it up, ran windows update, and got RDP working on it.  While that was going on, I downloaded VSS and TFS from my MSDNAA account, and I'm going to see about setting those services up over the next week or so.

So, hopefully I'll be able to document my TFS setup process here.  I'm not real sure what all TFS is supposed to do, and i'm sure it's way overkill for 1 man projects, but being familiar with it will be a valuable skill at my office, which is in the process of rolling TFS into production this year.  Having VSS for the interim while I work on the TFS install will be helpful as well.

Rich