Usual IT answer :) It depends.

What are you trying to achieve?

I'm fed up with fighting with Windows folder shares and permissions, whereas AD would let me have better control and easier distribution of those shares. Dosent seem to matter what machine or login I use, I always get different responses from Windows 10 network sharing ;) Sometimes works sometimes dosent etc. Its actually been ongoing battle for number of years over different versions of Windows, but now wife needs regular backups running for her work, and easy file access etc to her files on the server.

Also handy for locking down the kids PC's as well ;)

I have run SBS2011 for several years at home, mainly for Exchange Server, and it comes with AD.  I did have my other servers joined to the domain, and even a couple of clients.  But I found zero overall benefit.  I know just set up local users on Server 2016 (my file server, which is not domain joined) and go from there.  Works great.

I have tried and tried and tried to get the true anonymous / guest access working from Windows 10 clients to Server 2016, but the closest I can get is OSX can connect to a share a Guest.  So I just login with one of the local Server accounts.  I THINK this works when the server workgroup != client workgroup, but it's more hassle than its worth to figure it out.

Remember when you sign in with a domain account from a workstation its a different local profile, so you wont have the same settings as your local profile (start menu, shortcuts, etc.)

xpd:

 

I'm fed up with fighting with Windows folder shares and permissions, whereas AD would let me have better control and easier distribution of those shares. Dosent seem to matter what machine or login I use, I always get different responses from Windows 10 network sharing ;) Sometimes works sometimes dosent etc. Its actually been ongoing battle for number of years over different versions of Windows, but now wife needs regular backups running for her work, and easy file access etc to her files on the server.

 

Also handy for locking down the kids PC's as well ;)

 

 

 

 

 

Get a Synology NAS.

You can do the file sharing, backups, etc on it. If you still need more, it can work as an AD server, DNS, the + version can run VMs, containers, etc.

For home with these extra requirements, at the moment I would get a 218+ with two 6TB or 8TB drives.

Id love to, but cost is the issue ;) I already have a box running as a server, but is using Win10.

I could just look at rebuilding the box with some form of Linux along with what I need, but Im not up with the play on Linux so if stuff went wrong, Id be stuffed for a while :D

xpd:

 

Id love to, but cost is the issue ;) I already have a box running as a server, but is using Win10.

 

I could just look at rebuilding the box with some form of Linux along with what I need, but Im not up with the play on Linux so if stuff went wrong, Id be stuffed for a while :D

 

 

 

My main "server" I converted from windows 2012 to 10....I generally run the same user account names on all machines, so don't tend to get connection issues with shares.  The only issue I've found with converting to 10 was that there's a 10 connection limit to shares on non server os'

But other than that it works fine.

davidcole:

 

My main "server" I converted from windows 2012 to 10....I generally run the same user account names on all machines, so don't tend to get connection issues with shares.  The only issue I've found with converting to 10 was that there's a 10 connection limit to shares on non server os'

 

But other than that it works fine.

 

You'd assume setting up a different account with password and saved as a mapped drive would solve it....but no ;) So yeah, might give your way a go, add wifes local login to the server and see what happens :)

Ta

Open Media Vault is a great NAS distribution.

No FreeBSD or ZFS rubbish like FreeNAS (*ducks for cover from ZFS enthusiasts*), Debian based, super simple web GUI for config.

xpd:

 

davidcole:

 

My main "server" I converted from windows 2012 to 10....I generally run the same user account names on all machines, so don't tend to get connection issues with shares.  The only issue I've found with converting to 10 was that there's a 10 connection limit to shares on non server os'

 

But other than that it works fine.

 

 

You'd assume setting up a different account with password and saved as a mapped drive would solve it....but no ;) So yeah, might give your way a go, add wifes local login to the server and see what happens :)

 

Ta

 

 

 

That's all I did...it's the lazy mans approach, and I don't feel like learning AD just for at home.  Each machine (there's about 4 windows and 4 linux) generally have 3 accounts on them which allows for fairly easy sharing.

I pretty well much know AD (Used it everyday for last 10 odd years) , but being a geek....... :)

I would go with something like Open Media Vault that Chevolux linked, seems similar to a Synology experience. For me I just run an Ubuntu machine at home which I built from an old HP 54l microserver I aquired (actually two identical ones of which one is spare parts) that I put two 2TB spinning rust on plus a SSD for the OS, on this I created an open share, plus music and video is dlna shared via minidlna which works a charm, plus I have PiHole running along with UniFi controller.

If you are not so keen on Linux admin (which is not that hard) you can install something like Webmin that makes life way easier, in essense its a web gui that runs a bunch of perl scripts to do the hard work, easy peasy and very light.

Cyril

I did it here, and when the AD server died and there was nothing to log in against it was a right PITA to remove all the computers from the domain and set it up again. That is how I got into the mess where things are not mappable on some machines but work fine on others. Also over time most of my PCs were replaced with cheap china atom boxes which came with home windows 10 so AD was useless. Also the replacement one is server 2012 and I dont think I will be lucky enough to have licenses for newer ones handed to me at no cost.

Been migrating my windows raid 5 storage on the "server" over to storage spaces on windows 10 machines and OMG they are so slow in comparison and that is almost enough to make me go any buy a newer version of server to replace the old one with.

I do, just upgraded from SBS2011, which has been running faithfully for a long time, to full 2019 Domain running in HyperV. Its been a lot of work to get it as far as it is but good experience for work and once its done I can pretty much leave it and forget about it.

It also comes in handy as an Alpha test environment for WSUS patches before deployment. Veeam backups makes rolling back a snap if it all goes wrong :)