Problem Connecting an XP VBox to WHS

The Acer EasyStore AH340 is a nice little headless box running Windows Home Server. It has 4 SATA hard drive bays, a gigabit Ethernet, a few USB ports and an expansion slot. With an Intel Atom CPU, it is obviously not a power computer. But it serves the purpose of backing up home PCs well. But the bad news is that Acer has discontinued the product line.

Anyway, my AH340 currently is backing up a Windows XP laptop from work. But I am having much trouble trying to connect an XP virtual machine running in Oracle VirtualBox inside my Ubuntu desktop.

After connecting from the VBox to HTTP port 55000 on the AH340, I downloaded the WHSConnectorInstall.exe software. Starts it. It goes looking for the server on the network:

It seems to find it OK and start to download software:

But that's as far as it gets:

There isn't really much help in troubleshooting. I searched online but did not find anyone else with the exact same problem.

Wireshark came to the rescue. It turns out that the WHS connector installer program changes the Windows hosts file after it finds the home server. Because the XP VM network adaptor is configured in NAT mode, the home server's address is translated to 10.0.0.2 by VirtualBox.

After changing the VM's network interface to Bridged mode, everything works.

Cygwin OpenSSH Server

SSH is a Swiss army knife of secure remote access and much more. It has been prevalent on all operating systems but glaringly missing from all versions of Microsoft Windows. Which is one of the reasons I put Cygwin on every Windows machine I am allowed to install software on.

Installing the SSH service in Windows has become much easier with the newest version of Cygwin, as instructions found online changing from that long to this short.

Yes, it is that simple to setup OpenSSH in Windows now. But problems do occur. The easiest way to fix an OpenSSH SSHD service installation problem is probably to follow the Cygwin SSHD HowTo: How to run the OpenSSH SSHD server on Windows using Cygwin instruction, remove an old installation and reinstall.

One particular installation I botched kept giving me Windows error code 1069 when trying to start the service. I double checked the user id configured for the service but could not find anything wrong. As it turns out, one thing I need is to make sure that the /var/empty folder (in Cygwin) is owned by and writeable to the user running the sshd service, which is cyg_server if you follow the short instructions above and run ssh-host-config -y to setup the sshd service.

After the installation and starting the service, you should be able to test it by opening a Cygwin terminal window and connect to the computer itself using ssh localhost.

If you can connect to the localhost but not from a different computer, you may need to add a Windows firewall exception for SSH by allowing incoming connection to TCP port 22.

While writing this note, I found the two part tutorial The 101 Uses of OpenSSH (Part 1 and Part 2, published in the LINUX Journal on Jan 01, 2001 by Mick Bauer) to be a quite comprehensive read. But still, SSH offers much more.