Rock Hymas

So I’m working to setup my new “dev box at home” with Vista and finally noticed that there was no administrator account. That was not something I had heard about, but have since found quite a few articles referring to the change. It was interesting to see what the reasoning was behind the change, as well as the attempts of some to re-enable it for all the wrong reasons (like to get rid of UAC).

Based on this post at the Vista security blog, it appears that they’ve thought through the decision and all the interesting test cases fairly well. The one point I’m hitting is that I also have a Windows Home Server. On my other machines (XP, Media Center) I have the normal family accounts plus an Administrator account, each of which has some permissions on the WHS machine. This makes it easy on any machine to do administrative work on both the machine and the server. I found out about this whole no administrator thing when I tried to login (doh, where is it) and then create (can’t create an account named administrator) that account. Turns out it exists but is disabled.

Although it is fairly easy to enable the Administrator account, I’m not really sure if I should. It doesn’t have UAC enabled by default, but I can enable that. However, the fact that it’s different from other admin accounts makes me wonder if there are other differences that I should be aware of. I’ve been using Vista off and on at work for the last year and a half, and I haven’t noticed the need for the original “administrator” account until now. The alternative to enabling it would be to create a new admin account on all the other machines.

I think I’ll actually go that route. I like to have control of things, and being forced to create an account like this when I get a new machine is a good reminder of the bigger world of security issues that I need to be aware of. I should also note that despite the new UAC features in Vista, I’ll still be maintaining separate admin and user accounts. Though my wife sometimes gets annoyed when not running as admin I remind her that it’s kept our computers very safe over the last few years.

Around September, Kami and I decided we would dedicate some money to replacing our dying backup server. It was nothing fancy, just a simple box that backed up important stuff via FolderShare and provided access to our printer. With the impending release of Windows Home Server it made a lot of sense to just wait a bit and setup a new box with that for backup, printer sharing, and away-from-home access. A friend of mine had recently tried to convince me to start building my own PCs for the savings, the customization opportunities, and the ability to build something more likely to last longer. So after thinking about it a bit I decided to do just that, instead of just getting the HP MediaSmart Server. I’ll outline the process of building the box in this post, and later talk about installing and setting up the software.

You can see the computer I got as a NewEgg (but without the motherboard, which is no longer available). Some of the things I wanted over the MediaSmart server included dual hard drives with more total storage space, a faster, upgradeable processor and motherboard, and 1G of RAM instead of 512 MB. What’s cool is that I got all this for less than the price of the cheaper MediaSmart server.

So, everything finally arrived and I found an evening to put it all together. I basically followed the instructions that came with each part and used Jeff Atwood’s excellent Building a PC series to direct my efforts. I skipped the overclocking, since I don’t really care about that at this point, nor do I have the time to really put that kind of effort into this PC. However, I may do it with the new dev box I’m buying for home use next month.

I got everything set up and connected, and it worked! I have yet to install the software, because I have yet to get the software. I planned on using Microsoft’s company store to get a nice discount on Windows Home Server, but they’ve been out ever since I started working on this. And the discount is big enough that I can wait, praying that our old backup server doesn’t totally die in the meantime. So I’ll post about that soon.