Using 2008r2 as server and workstation simultaneously?

[wolleric]

Hi everyone,

I would like to use 2008 R2 as a server for my small home-LAN. Is it possible to use the server pc itself as a workstation simultaneously? The server can be down when no clients are running.

To be more specific: I want 2008r2 to serve things like ADS as PDC, DHCP, DNS, SMB, possibly Web+FTP etc., and at the same time be able to login on the very same pc as a standard domain user and do stuff like office work or so. Is 2008 R2 able to do that?

Many thanks,
Eric

[Arris]

That’s no problem at all: those services (ADS/PDC, DHCP, DNS etc.) are running in the background serving requests while you can just use it to do office work or play games! 🙂 Also creating a (limited) domain user to work with locally is easy to do.

Arris

[halladayrules]

Arris is correct. The roles that you require will not eat much a ton of system resources and will only increase your system overhead slightly. You might notice a slower boot time, but with all the thousands and thousands AD objects that has to be processed that is normal. I’ve had AD running with 2K8R2 as a workstation and outside of a tad performance loss due to the increased system overhead it ran fine. I don’t think it makes an optimal workstation though. I sleep next to my computer at night and I don’t like the light shining in my eye with the fans spinning and its annoying so i shut it off and having to wait 2 minutes every morning for it to boot up instead of the 39 seconds im used to now it can be a pain in the butt. But thats my personal preference and not yours. If you leave yours on all the time, then it should be no problem at all.

Make sure you have the ability to edit GPOs. The default Administrator account has these rights.

1. Start > Administrative Tools > Group Policy Management
2. Expand Forest
3. Expand Domains
4. Expand YOUR domain

Right-click on Default Domain Policy

Navigate to Policies > Computer Configuration > Security Settings > Local Policies > User Rights Assignment > Allow log on locally

Either add the specific standard domain user you want to use to log into the local machine or add the “domain users” account group which would apply to ALL standard users.

Go back to group policy management

Right-click on Default Domain Controllers

Repeat the same process as before.

[wolleric]

Sounds perfect! So all the services are started, the domain controller is established, and then the login prompt appears? That would be exactly what I am looking for! 🙂
Slower boot is no problem, and I do not need that much run-time performance either. I must say that the PC in question is quite an old one (Sempron 3600+ with 1.5 GB DDR1-ram…), but that should do the job for a 3-client-LAN server, right?

Thanks a lot so far, regards,
Eric

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