Creating an AD domain carries a substantial amount of extra overhead that they might not want to deal with. The basics of setting one up are simple enough but actually building out/maintaining the infrastructure the correct way can be a lot of extra work (2 DCs for redundancy, sites configuration, users, groups, initial GPOs). There are also licensing and CAL considerations (bare metal and hypervisor, both different), domain and forest options that can paint you into a nasty corner of you’re not careful, and a whole host of other things to think about and plan around. I’m not arguing that a domain is bad, on the whole I agree 100%. I just like to set the record straight that building a new production domain isn’t as simple as a lot of people would have you believe, and OP might not have the time to go through all that.

I feel like this is legitimately more true than a lot of people think. Say what you want about the average end user, but UX is a HUGE driver with regard to adoption and user uptake. You can have the best of everything else in your application, but if the UX sucks, folks just aren’t going to use it

Yo, please tag this NSFW… we didn’t come here to see this kind of smut

I’ll also add to this that WSL is a security nightmare. If something manages to dig its way into your wsl install and add, for example, WINE, there’s no end to the (hidden to your av) mischief it can enact.

I was just saying that there can be a lot of good reasons for downtime. Heck, I use a secondary in my network because sometimes my unraid host starts dnsmasq and it clobbers my adguard container

Depending on the client, it can be. The Microsoft page pretty cleanly defines expected dns client behavior [https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/windows-server/networking/dns-client-resolution-timeouts#what-is-the-default-behavior-of-a-windows-7-or-windows-8-dns-client-when-two-dns-servers-are-configured-on-the-nic](Microsoft learn). There haven’t been any published changes to this that I’ve seen, and it more or less matches my experience. Linux is a lawless land in this respect, but it really boils down to “it might”, so caveat emptor there. That’s also why I suggested a public ad blocking dns server as a secondary, in case multicast dns does its multicast dns thing

No worries, I had the same thought at first and was very confused for a minute

OP already said that their current DHCP solution (the router) can’t push multiple DNS servers. Having a good secondary can be really helpful for things like power blips, maintenance windows, and cats pulling power cables. There are a few solutions that also do ad blocking that can make good secondaries

This would be great except OP said that their router can’t push 2 DNS addresses. Otherwise, ya, redundant services is always best

If you already have pihole in your environment, I would just use that. DHCP is pretty light weight, so the pi should be more than capable, and you don’t want to complicate your core services more than you need to

I use tandoor myself, but mealie is also a solid choice

the monkey’s paw curls

You fool! What have you done?!

I also run an unraid instance. I just use a regular tower build with an asrock rack board (the ipmi is nice), a r5 3600, 32gb ECC, and 4x4TB drives. I also have 1 ssd for vms and 1 ssd for a write cache. I think the biggest advantage of unraid is the simplicity once you grok how storage works regarding parity and how you add container apps. VM management and container management are extremely simple, and the next release (in rc now) is supposed to make ZFS a first class option.

I’ll second this. Manage Engine does have its faults, but it’s not terrible, patches a few Linux distros, and doesn’t cost a ton.