Once you place a Windows Home Server into your network, however large or small it may be, It's time to totally re-think our ideas on network shares.
I agonised on this and tried everything I could think of to get my client PC's to see shares from other PC's on the network in the WHS share space. I tried mapping drives then dragging them to the WHS shared folder, I tried new folders in the WHS share and synchronizing them all with no luck...
Then the light finally came on.. It made perfect sense. all 5 of the PC's on my network are more vulnerable with shared directory's just by virtue of the fact that they allow network access to the drive. access is the first step towards compromise. Not to mention the fact that trying to keep track of the contents and possible duplicates of 4 or more PC's with multiple shares can be a daunting task. One of the greatest things I can achieve with WHS is the ability to consolidate the shares from all of my networked PC's and place them on the Server.
This means aside from normal AV running on the clients I can focus on monitoring and protecting access to 1 PC instead of 5. From now on there will be "NO" more shares on any of the client PC's on my network, all shared files will be placed on the server where they are easier to manage. This is where WHS is much more than a automatic backup mechanism or extra storage space.
Over and over I have downloaded a major update such as Windows Defender and then placed a copy in a share on each one of the PC's on my network and then went to each PC to install the software! now I just download it into the application directory on WHS and install from there. I only have 1 file to delete when I'm done, and didnt have to transfer a 25 MB file 4 times across the network to get it to each PC.
