I would consider myself a windows fanboy and not even I would use IIS
It’s kinda funny because I’m pretty sure most of the people here defending the idea of windows server in the home dont actually use windows server at home.
There seems to be a few arguments that its just easier to get going, and I’m not so sure about that. Starting up a new ADDC from scratch and implementing the services you want isnt exactly a cake walk. I suppose thats all relative and/or subjective though.
And do people actually use AD’s in their homelab because they need/want it or becuase they want experience for work?
If you’re not utilizing AD then I would begin to question the point of windows server. Thats kinda the bread and butter. Joining machines to the domain, managing and deploying software, setting up group policy, etc.
Maybe you might run through it just to see what all is there?
That’s true. Exploration is always nice. And maybe I just don’t know enough about AD, but it sounds like SSH+Ansible (Tower) can do all the same things? I definitely enjoy a more manual approach (everything runs Gentoo at my house) so maybe that’s why I don’t get it
Eh? The whole premise of a Home Lab is for exploration, education and general mucking about to see how stuff works (or doesn’t). A non-educational capacity isn’t a home lab, that’s production - even if you are only using it to host your ‘exotic photo collection’ or personal blog.
@moderators Maybe split this thread into “Why Windows in the Enterprise?”
There seem to be two different conversations and some Linux-isms floating in.
Obvs keep the homelab posts
I ran gentoo once just to see what it was about.
Theres a lot in windows server that you cant do without setting up a traditional ADDC.
There seems to be 3 camps.
Run what you run at work but at home
Run whatever just to run it
Not actually a lab, just doing this for funsies
I’ve had legitimately the exact opposite experience. Serious DNS issues that they helped resolve within an hour. English speaking, highly technical engineer.
We get it, you hate Windows. That’s not what this thread is about.
This thread is gonna make me set up a damn domain controller just for the hell of it.
On Samba? /s
maybe I will try and add a samba member to the forest just to see.
I have the room on my server for another windows and linux VM
Can you point out what posts should be moved to new thread? I tried to comb trough the posts but it seems homelabs and enterprise is being discussed in same posts 
In 20 years of actually doing this shit, I can count the number of times I’ve had to run regedit to fix a windows server problem on one hand. And that’s even if I count the same thing multiple times. Exchange tweaking basically from memory. And fixing FRS journal wrap problems with dead domain controllers. Which don’t happen anymore with AD now using DFS-R.
Maybe I’m just lucky. Maybe I don’t install shitware on my servers. Who knows.
I thought it would be obvious. I guess who cares at this point
You know how these threads always go, you’d feel a disturbance in the force if it didn’t. We’ve all had our fun best to call in a preemptive strike on this thread, eventually things will get out of hand 
Yeah no point in being sad at least we bragged about our Hyper-V homelabs that got us our $40k a year 70 hour a week jobs that we abandoned ASAP for working in the cloud space to automate ourselves out of jobs
Sounds like incredible luck. Many of Microsoft’s technet articles guide the user through registry changes for various issues, from bugfixes to security hardening. Many rounds of OpsLock issues with shares come to mind.
Pretty much this.
@reavessm I gave you my use case using Samba AD.
Again, this.
@reavessm What is your idea of a home lab exactly? I think understanding your expectation would yield better answers for you.
To me, a homelab is place to learn and play with technology. I use my homelab to host several sites that I use daily (Nextcloud, Keycloak, Gitlab, etc.) and also other services that I use purely to learn skills necessary for future jobs (working on OpenStack).
I think the big confusion is that while I recognize the importance of learning skills for work in your homelab, that’s not what I wanted to talk about in this post. If the only reason people use Windows in their homelab is to learn for work, cool. I’m not going to stop you, but honestly that’s a boring conversation and not really post-worthy. I want to know if people use Hyper-V purely because they think it’s easier to cluster servers, or they use Windows for AD because they have a lot of gaming machines that need Windows and they want to keep them together. I think this post got sidetracked with talking about work-related education because that IS a big part of homelabs, but there’s not much to talk about imo. It’s just work has windows so I have windows.
I was looking more for a feature to feature comparison of software used by people purely to serve their personal needs.
