Please Dear God No: The Dangers of Windows Home Server

Bill Gates wants to take over the home server market. But this market doesn't even exist yet, so first he wants to create the market, then take it.

Please dear God no.

Take it from me, folks. You don't need this. For $500 bucks, you can get a deal on the cheapest Dell they offer and put Ubuntu on it and not have to worry about the unending stream of headaches that are inherent in a system designed to be "easy". Easy means insecure, and if you thought getting your workstation compromised was bad, wait 'til somebody roots your home server.

Lately I've been considering strongly the idea of building a real home server, as opposed to the hodge-podge of spare gear I cobbled together in order to make my mail server. To do this, I'm probably going to spend $500 or so on parts for a new workstation and then just use my current workstation with a new disk as a server. Total cost for building the server? About three hours of my time and a spare drive I have laying around. I haven't chosen an OS yet, but OpenBSD and Ubuntu are both free, and if I'm really lazy, Ubuntu will mail an installation CD to my home. For free.

And it's not going to have to run Automatic Updates every day just to keep me safe. The Windows Home Server project is a terrible idea because Windows is just a terrible server platform. Try a BSD or a Linux variant and you'll sleep better at night and save yourself a ton of money.

The biggest argument people might point at this idea is that in order to run a Linux server, you have to be an elite UNIX sysadmin. It helps, of course, but it's hardly necessary. Linux live CDs are so plentiful and feature-rich these days that turning on Samba is about as easy as clicking a button during OS install.

Of course, you will want to pick the Linux distro that's right for you. I wouldn't recommend my mom take a stab at OpenBSD, but she could probably navigate a CentOS install if I was on the phone with her.

That's amazing.

I really don't want to see a Windows Home Server, because honestly they haven't won me over with their home offerings and I'm not impressed with their server software, either. How on God's green Earth am I going to swallow the fusion of the two?

If anybody needs me, I'll be in the angry dome. Installing SuSE.