Running Windows Server at home

Ask most anyone who runs Windows at home what edition of the operating system he or she is using, and odds are you'll hear a fairly predictable roster of responses: Windows XP Home, XP Professional, Vista's various incarnations, maybe even Windows 2000 Workstation.

But what about a server edition of Windows? Who needs a server-level OS at home, and why?

A server in a home network isn't as exotic as it sounds -- in fact, you probably have at least one Windows machine in your home network right now that's acting as a server in some capacity. Most of the functions performed by such a machine should be pretty familiar: sharing a printer or a network connection, sharing files and folders, or

providing space for backup operations. What makes regular desktop Windows limited as far as such things go is a set of artificial constraints imposed by Microsoft about how much functionality they can offer. These constraints, arbitrary as they may be, don't always prevent you from getting things done in a home environment -- but they're worth enumerating in detail and understanding.

Windows Server: Fewer limits, but more money

One of the most commonly cited reasons for using Server at home is its support for more than 10 simultaneous NetBIOS connections. NetBIOS connections are used to create file and printer shares in Windows, and desktop versions of Windows -- XP Home and Pro, and Windows 2000 Workstation -- have specific limits about how many inbound NetBIOS connections can be established. A Windows XP Professional machine can host up to 10 inbound connections, as does Windows 2000 Workstation; Windows XP Home can host only five.

Note that these connections are enumerated on a per-computer basis: if you have one computer connecting to another computer that has a file share and a shared printer, the file share and the shared printer are all counted as one connection. (On a personal note, I did in fact run a Web server out of my house via a dial-up link -- almost a decade ago -- using Windows NT as the server. It was never more than an experimental thing, though and as soon as I could buy my own Web site hosting with a decent amount of disk space, I did.)

If you habitually have more than 10 computers in the same household (LAN party, anyone?), then one instance of Server may be useful.
The vast majority of the time, you can get away with an XP Pro/Vista setup -- especially since there's a quirk to the way NetBIOS connections are established.

After a certain amount of idle time (about 10 minutes), a NetBIOS connection is automatically dropped. This way, in theory, more than 10 clients could connect in round-robin fashion; it's just when you have 10 or more clients connecting continuously that it becomes a problem. A similar restriction exists for inbound TCP connections in desktop editions of Windows, but unless you have ambitions to run an Internet server out of your house this is generally even less of an issue.

Yet another reason why someone might run some variety of Windows Server in lieu of XP (or even Vista) is support for server-level applications. Some programs simply don't run on anything other than some variety of Windows Server. That said, many of those programs can be found in equivalent editions for desktop machines; for instance, Microsoft has started offering functionally similar editions of certain server applications that can be run on desktop editions of Windows.

For those who can't run the full version of SQL Server, there's the SQl Server Express Edition; its biggest limitation is that it can't deal with any single database bigger than 1GB. Another server-level app from Microsoft that will run on desktop editions of Windows, but with connection constraints, is Internet Information Server.

A third major reason for adding some kind of server in a home environment is to bridge the gaps between multiple platforms. One of our editors has an Intel-powered Mac, a Macbook, and an assortment of Windows machines. In my own home, I've had all of the above at one time or another plus various kinds of Linux boxes. If you set up one server to support file- and printer-sharing to all of those machines at once, that's generally far easier than trying to get each of them to talk to the other. Of course, this implies that the server platform you're using can do that in the first place but, mercifully, most of them can do this -- and in that respect Windows Server is only one of several possible choices that also include a Linux box or a device dedicated to sharing files across a network.