Re: Rebuilding my media server….maybe
I love my WHS setup, so I’m clearly biased. The PC backups and drive pool are just plain awesome. However, if you’re using Media Center, then the integration is currently still lacking (but slowly getting better). If the jumper trick works, great, but I understand there may be a performance hit from it. Otherwise, you’ll need to wait for WHS v2.
I wouldn’t exactly say that those additional services are “trivial” to set up. Since they aren’t supported functions, it may be more work than you’re expecting or may not work exactly as you would like. I haven’t done any of them, so I can’t say, but I have read about it being done. While I’m currently doing “unsupported” things on my WHS box, I’ve come to the realization that I would prefer to have WHS simply do WHS tasks and would rather have a non-WHS OS performing these other tasks.
Note that WHS does allow remote access to your files, so you may or may not want/need the FTP server. Sharing a printer across Windows boxes is pretty simple, no matter what. Obviously, you don’t need a full server to accomplish that.