RE: Central HOSTS file?

["Paul Gordon" <paul@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Errr.... how long have you got?

To run a Windows domain, you need at the very least, one windows server.
Now that could very easily be running any version of Windows server
right back to NT4 - this is sufficient to provide a Windows Domain
Controller, and all the attendant services it requires... NT4 has the
advantage of being very cheap, and VERY light on its hardware
requirements.. I know of NT4 servers that are running on old 486DX chips
with just 128MB RAM... The OS footprint is also very small, so just
about any old desktop PC you might have lying around probably *could* be
made into an NT4 server. Because it's so small, it also boots up really
quickly, and because it's so venerable (that's a polite way of saying
ancient!) it's also very mature & fairly stable. Downside is of course
that it's no longer supported, and no longer having any updates released
for it.

Obviously NT4 doesn't have all the bells & whistles that the newer
server versions (2000, & 2003) do, but of course these newer flavours
demand correspondingly higher-spec hardware to run them. (I Personally
run Windows server 2003 R2, Enterprise Edition, which I'm just about to
rebuild onto new hardware: Intel Core2 Duo CPU (E6600), 4GB RAM, SATA
RAID controller, 3x320GB Western Digital RAID edition SATA-II-300 disks,
in a RAID5 set; although you don't *NEED* quite that much just to run a
simple Windows domain...

Once you have a Windows domain, you join all your workstations to it.

Then you can have nice things like centralized control of permissions,
logon scripts, DNS/DHCP/WINS services, Web/FTP server, roaming profiles
and loads of other nice things.

Windows Domain controllers also run quite well as virtual machines under
Virtual server/VMWare etc... although the point of doing this just for
one VM is debatable, since you have to have the VM running 24/7 so you
obviously have to have the Virtual server host machine running 24/7, so
the question then arises why not just run the Windows server directly on
the hardware rather than arguably "wasting" resources running 2
OS's
concurrently on the same machine?..

I could go on for quite a while, so I think I'd better force myself to
stop now...

Paul G.


> -----Original Message-----
> From: ukha_d@xxxxxxx [mailto:ukha_d@xxxxxxx] On Behalf
Of
> Mark McCall
> Sent: 22 February 2007 13:19
> To: UKHA_D Group
> Subject: RE: [ukha_d] Central HOSTS file?
>
>
> Thanks Paul. What is required for a domain at home and what are the
pros
> and
> cons?