Setting up a home network (geek fun at its best!)

[marcus]

During the week I have set up a home network of 3 PCs as some of you may know (papercut, boog etc) with the aim of learning about network installation, deployment and administration which I have no chance of doing elsewhere.

So far my network consists of the following, and I was wondering where to take it next and if you guys can think of anything worthwhile for me to investigate.

1 x Win 2k3 Fileserver in a Active Directory Domain
3 x Client PCs
1 x ADSL Router acting as my internet gateway and switch.

- Various user accounts with different levels of access
- Roaming profiles, restricted in size.
- Home areas and automatic drive mapping via scripts
- Shadow copy backups and routine backing up of profile and home areas.
- Group policy settings and restrictions to control user environments.
- Backup of Outlook PST and PAB files stored on server.

I also installed and ran MS Exchange, however was unable to connect this to my ISP Exchange without the use of 3rd party software, so have gone back to normal outlook.

I also wanted to go RAID 5 but changed my mind when I considered the cost, and the fact I could learn most about Raid setups in an hour doesnt justify the cost.

The network is working well and fast, any opinions or advice on where to take it next would be appreciated.

[mid]

Its probably a good idea to stay away from RAID 5.

Its nice and fast for reading data, but crap (as in worse than a normal drive) for writing it. You get more reliability and less recovery hassle with straight mirroring, and faster performance with straight striping. 0+1 is the Don if you can afford it, though.

[Tom Salter]

Set up an apache webserver with NAT!

Or do it the MS way with IIS.

[dmg]

where to take it next?, well it all depends on what your hoping to get out of it and how much detail you want to go into in each area.
What you have there is a good basic set up to play around with which could take you either years to master or days to get bored of. The trouble with MS stuff is that its so easy to set up and get working in a fashion that you dont learn much from the proccess.

I'd definatly stick the exchange server back on and start using that, just reg any old domain name and get the primary MX record pointed to your external IP (asuming you have a fixer ip?), forward your smpt traffic to the exchange server's ip and away you go. even if not its still worth doing and just to see how the exchange server ties in with AD.

A major concern of mine would be to understand security especaily external, look at ways you can lock things down and read up on the vunerabilities and exploites that will effect you, the more services you add to your system the more exposed it will be to attack.

Secondly I'd look at internal security and accessability, AD is very powerfull but its not always straight forward with it use of policies and rules so get a handle on that.

theres so much you could learn about that you might end up just going round in circles without any direction, what is it your trying to acheive? maybe creating a scenario would be a good starting place, say your a small business with < 25 users, but some are laptop users that need access from abroad and you need certain specific apps etc, and then work from that and see how best to get the right set up for the job.

[Ginger Tosser]

Group polices are fun (did i actually say that ) to mess around with on a home network. One thing i'd recommend you try is DNS, AD cannot work with DNS so a good understanding will help you in the future.

I'd also go for a 2nd multi o/s server for testing of migration tools.
The 2nd server will help you learn about replication and server roles.