On Jan 30, 2009, at 3:40 AM, maccrawj wrote:
Agreed also, morons still buy "Home" & "Basic" editions of windows that lock them out of basic security features like file ACLS so it's a high target. I imagine there is a free linux server replacement for AD/LDAP that could replace the Windows server portion, would run on next to nothing hardware wise, and still allow XP/Vista/? windows clients to work as if attacked to Windows domain.
Getting close to this with Samba. At work we've been running Samba as a replacement NT4 PDC for about a decade. Unfortunately, while Samba can be a NT4-level server, and a AD member server, it cannot be a full AD domain server. That's being worked on for the next release--Samba4-- at some point in the future though, as I understand it.
Servers in houses is long overdue and but soon happen given the amount of in-home digital data & services being put to use. It will be your $100K, multi-ipod, pc for each family member households but they're always the 1st given disposable income & interest.
In general, I disagree with this, and think we will be getting farther and farther from a server in the house. Maybe a server in a datacenter hosted and managed and controlled by some company that you then get a web interface to. I think it's somewhat part of the "Web 2.0" transition. Look how few people even install email clients anymore. I would bet almost everyone on this list uses Thunderbird, Eudora, Mail.app (me), or some other email client, yet I believe the vast majority of people use yahoo or gmail or whatever web interfaces almost exclusively. I graduated from college in 2004--during my freshman year in 2000, everybody installed the provided Mulberry app to check their email (if they didn't use Netscape/whatever -- I used pine!). By 2004, the college had stopped providing Mulberry because nobody used it anymore...all their work went to their webmail interface (I still used pine).
Anyway, the point of that semi-rant was just to say that I think most people are moving farther and farther away from hosting applications or servers at home. Not saying I'm a FAN of this--I don't think I would be subscribed to this list if I were :-) but I think it's the shape of things to come...
Scott
