As a consequence of changing my private project focus all currently active and already inactive WHS v1 projects have been stopped. This includes the following projects:

• Codename “Umbrella”
• Router Control
• Windows Home Server on Facebook
• Volunteer

Currently no WHS v2 versions are planned and as along as Microsoft does not include an open add-in store there won’t be any future releases.

Sorry to all who are disappointed by this and those who have been long-time companions on my WHS adventures esp. to Christopher (HSB), Alexander (HSB) and Alex (HSL). Special thanks to those who are dedicated to the WHS community and made this adventure possible: Terry (WGS) and Martin (HSB). Finally I want to thank Microsoft for providing an existing product and all the sponsors of the Windows Home Server Add-on Challenge 09.

PS: If someone is interested in continuing one of the projects, please drop me a mail.

Ylian Saint-Hilaire from Intel blogged that there is a new version of Intel’s UPnP stack available. I’m goiing to check this out ASAP.

HOMEPAGE

The new version adds experimental support for TR-64. There are some major changes going on which will be part of CTP3.

DOWNLOAD, Homepage

In the last days I realized that there would have to be some deep changes on the user experience to overcome puzzled questions of users whever they did something wrong if their router does not implement UPNP correctly. Additionally a lot of users did not even use the diagnostic tool and they did not active the error reporting either.

So I decided to make some changes here. First, the error reporting is now enabled by default and and the process of selecting a router (for being monitored) changed completely and is now covered by a wizard. Secondly, there is now a new type of information gathered (optionally) which does not only cover working but also unsupported routers. This information is used to build up a database of supported and unsupported routers since being supported often relates to the router’s firmware version. As soon as the database contains enough data and I am sure how to analyze it the information will be made public on the Schema DB.

Feel free to test this version and please submit errors (even typos and other stuff) here.

BTW: Those hoping for news on the AIC winning add-in: expect more next week…

DOWNLOAD, Screenshots

After a long time the new Router Control v1.1 is available by now. It contains a lot of more features like monitoring of port forwardings, router hijacking detection and a new diagnostic tool.

Thanks to everyone who gave feedback directly or by uploading the router schema. I want to encourage everyone to enable the new automatic error reporting which anonymously reports bugs to the Schema DB. Please report any issues you encounter (e.g. bugs or missing texts or images).

DOWNLOAD, Screenshots

UPDATE: Hotfix available: v1.1b! Thanks to KTMFactoryRider and the new automatic error reporting I was able to fix a lot of severe bugs during the last days and came up with some critical improvements.

AVM did it: With the latest version of their firmware they broke the UPNP support. One of the device schemas is invalid and so the Windows UPNP stack cannot access it anymore :( .

Currently I am evaluating different UPNP stacks (again). I took a look at Platinum which seems to be a quite fast and solid UPNP stack.

However it seems to be a little bit intollerant against broken schemas. Feel free to take a look on yourself – the patch source code is Ms-PL/LGPL.

UPDATE: I uploaded the full source including binaries (.\Platinum\Source\Managed\Debug). Keep in mind that the binaries’ license is GPL or requires a commercial license due to Platinum license restrictions.

PATCH, SRC/BIN

Terry Walsh from WGS posted that D-Link added CAPTCHA into the web interfaces of their routers to prevent automated attacks agains routers. This should however not increase the resistance against CSRF attacks or intrusions using the router’s shell (Telnet/SSH) like used by the latest worm/bot network.

ARTICLE

Some of you might have wondered what I have been up to lately. I am happy to tell you the results of the hard work we did in the last weeks together with our colleagues from home-server-blog.de and WeGotServed.co.uk: Offical annoucenments in German (HSB) and English (WGS).

UPDATE: The Microsoft’s WHS team wrote a post about the AIC09 on the offical WHS team blog.

UPDATE2: The prize list is now officially announced in German (HSB) and English (WGS).

UPDATE3: The AIC09 is now closed and we will review the nearly 200 submissions to select the 30 most promising.

UPDATE4: The AIC09 finalists are now published: 1.-10. in German (HSB) and English (WGS); 11.-30. in German (HSB) and English (WGS). Voting will start tomorrow!

UPDATE5: Voting has started in German (HSB) and English (WGS)!

The German website TecChannel successfully hacked some routers using Cross Site Request Forgery. The attackers use open sessions to the router web interface and change the routers configuration by directly POSTing to its web interface.

There is a simple rule to avoid this: Whenever you change the settings of your router (using the web interface of course) make sure all other tabs and windows (of the same browser: IE, FF, etc.) are CLOSED! After reconfiguration, LOGOUT of the router’s web interface!

ARTICLE (German)