Server-based Home Network

Why go with a server network if it takes a bit more planning, more training, and costs more than a peer-to-peer network? Well, the answer is TCO, or Total Cost of Ownership.

There is two workstations, one mine, the other the wife's and two PCs for each of my children. (My youngest is not in school, yet). Add to that, there is also one Linux workstation, that I dabble with, and a laptop. I dock the laptop by simply plugging into the switch ports that I have left open for that purpose. Finally, I have had a server for about two years, serving as a centralized member server. It was hooked up in a peer-to-peer fashion. Anyone who could access one of my computers could access the server as well.

There are currently 7 computers, with occasional laptops from visiting relatives, personal accounts are much easier to maintain and more private. Maintaining "open" single-user systems means nobody can save personal settings** and maintaining 7 personal accounts on 7 machines means having a total of 49 accounts. And any of those 49 accounts can freely access personal files such as my email, my reserve files, financial, web pages, etc. This does mean learning to use user-level access, instead of share-level access, however it allows better control of what files can be accessed or denied by the user.

Because the personal accounts reside on the server, guest and family members can access the Internet either through any one of the available computers or patch into a nearby switch and log in.

**Users can maintain personal settings, however, computers need to store this information and this take up substantial hard drive space as more users gain accounts.

With the user's account hosted on the server, a script written into a user's logon allows the account tol "follow" the user from computer to computer, remembering favorite settings. Try that with a PTP network! If you are not a scripting heavy, fear not, many of these scripts can be found on the Internet.

Even as I am typing this, my kids are screaming for more disk space. I tell them "Disk manangement! Disk management!" I too, am looking to get more space so it is only a matter of time. But buying larger disks for each computer gets expensive. It's about $80 for a 20GB Hard drive and about $100-110 for a 40BG disk for me. That's about $300 is disks for about 80GB of storage. But at the current time, it would cost me about $150 for a single 120BG hard drive at some of my favorite vendors. Rather than upgrade every computer, if I place this on the server, which already has a single 40GB disk, that becomes 160BG of disk space available to everyone on the network. In Windows NT 4.0 Sp4 or better, you can limit the amount of space the kids want to chew up by setting disk quotas in the System Policy Editor.

Backups are easy problem. back up the server storage only. Folks want their files backed up, guess where they are going to store their data? Anything on the other systems is their responsibility. Sounds cruel? I have to maintain my workstation just like my other users do, as well as the server. This is a household, not a corporation. "...And kids, after you clean your room, I want you to get rid of unneeded files on your hard drives"...and it works!