I’m curious as to why someone would need to do that short of having a bunch of users and a small office at home. Or maybe managing the family’s computers is easier that way?
I was considering a domain controller (biased towards linux since most servers/VMs are linux) but right now, for the homelab, it just seems like a shiny new toy to play with rather than something that can make life easier/more secure. There’s also the problem of HA and being locked out of your computer if the DC is down.
Tell me why you’re running it and the setup you’ve got that makes having a DC worth it.
Thanks!
I had it running in a genuine small office environment with 8 employees, who all need to run Windows due to some software constraints.
Policy management and user account controls are great for security, and remote management via rdp is also neat.
I ran it previously because I came from that world and I just thought that’s what you did. I was less Linux-y then. It’s really overkill for such a small network but if you want to learn AD then it might be worth it. Personally I hope to never look at AD again but alas I need moneyz.
If you do decide to run it make sure you enable profile caching in group policy, it will prevent you from being locked out when your DC is down. Also if you have laptops you can safely bring them outside your network and they will still be able to log in.
You could look at freeIPA or something similar to stay on Linux.
I’m an AD specialist, starting when it came out with server 2000, and can tell you it’s a waste of time for a home network unless you are doing this just because you want to learn it.
It will definitly not make your life any easier, and will increase attack vectors, especially if you don’t know how to secure and protect it.
I agree that for this size of network AD is definitely not something you want to deal with unless you want to learn how it works.
However, I’m not sure it really increases attack vectors to have it running, outside of the fact that it’s a new network service on the LAN. The out of the box default configuration is not bad these days, security-wise
The attack vectors I’m thinking of just come from the inherent complexity and centralization. I’m just considering the amount of damage that can be done with a compromised DA account for example vs a non directory environment.
It’s complicated. Done right it can be more secure, not done right it’s less secure.
I also only get brought in for problems for the last however many years, so I’m probaby a bit biased at this point haha.
I have had to tell companies they are going to have to rebuild thier AD from scratch because they didn’t know what thier DSRM password was (usually after a ransomware attack). These are the sort of hassles I think about vs non AD.
Thank you. I was planning to keep my domain controller offline (not connected to the internet) and run a WSUS to update it, but I’ll keep that in mind. Indeed, I could use FreeIPA too, and I’ll probably need to consider if it’s even worth it to run a DC at all. It just seemed like a really solid idea for learning more about DCs, but indeed, now that I think about it, it doesn’t have much use in a homelab other than the people running mini datacenters in their labs.
Thanks!
It seems cool but it’s just going to be a big headache man. I would just spin up a domain controller and maybe some workstations to play around with.
