Anybody here running AD on-prem in your homelab?

MigratingtoLemmy@lemmy.world to Selfhosted@lemmy.world – 70 points –

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!

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AD is heavily reliant on the DNS protocol, so heavily in fact that a large component of an AD deployment is a DNS server.

So basically, when the AD DNS server takes over on your network It'll do DNS things as you'd expect, when it gets a DNS call with the AD domain it will answer with the AD server every time

If your AD domain and your web address domain are domain.com then whenever the AD DNS server gets theh call it won't answer with the IP address of the web server, it'll answer with the AD server, even when you are trying to access a web service like domain.com/Plex or something.

You can change the DNS server used on the host, but then you'll be borkin domain functionality in weird ways

Yea, you'd want an entirely different domain or an internal like domain.lan or in my case what I should have done is made it a subdomain like ad.domain.com

And also it's a bitch to change the AD domain once you get it all setup hence I've been procrastinating with hosts file workarounds lmfao

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