Introduction W hen you think of the word server, you probably first imagine either a massive main- frame hulking behind locked doors in the bowels of some large corporation or a powerful and expensive desktop-like device full of esoteric hardware that helps it--and perhaps a few others like it--run the network of a medium-sized company. The common thread here is that we've always thought of servers as business machines. With the exception of a few hardcore geeks and technical writers (not that the two designations are mutually exclusive), having a server in your home seemed, well, excessive. What home needs the power of a server? What home can afford the expense of such a high-end device? But then a funny thing happened: times changed. All those one-computer households suddenly became two-, three-, and even four-computer households. Broadband became nearly ubiquitous, and of course every family member wanted a piece of the new pipe. We began digitizing our media en masse; we wanted to share that media with other members of the family and with other devices scattered around the house, and we discov- ered wireless computing and became addicted to working and playing anywhere we wanted. The result has been an explosion of home networks over the past few years. However, it didn't take long for amateur network administrators to learn something that their professional counterparts have known for many years: the larger the network, the more you need some device in the middle of it all to coordinate activities and offer a central repository for data. And our home networks have started to become quite large, with multiple computers, multiple devices such as wireless access points and network attached storage drives, and increasingly massive files, from multiple-megabyte digital audio files to multi-gigabyte digital video files. Suddenly we, too, needed a powerful machine in the middle of it all to keep things humming. It helped significantly that extremely powerful computers had became extremely inexpen- sive, but one big problem remained: A server computer needs a server operating system (OS). Unfortunately, the only choices here simply weren't reasonable or practical choices for the home: the powerful but expensive Windows Server 2008 or the various flavors of Linux, all of which are far too complex and arcane for the average home network. However, the last piece of the puzzle fell into place when Microsoft announced Windows Home Server to the world in January 2007. Now we all had access to a server OS that was designed specifically for home networks. We had access to a server OS that was easy to configure, simple to use, inexpensive, and could run on a variety of hardware. We had a server OS that not only did the usual server tasks--store data and manage users--but also went much further with automatic backups for every computer, streaming media, and easy-to-configure access to any desktop from the network or from the Internet. Welcome, then, to Microsoft Windows Home Server 2011 Unleashed, Third Edition. My goal in this book is to take you beyond the basic Windows Home Server Dashboard interface