The DC has nothing to do with internet connection other than handing out an IP addy....like I said, the 'modem' is hooked into a wireless router...with a piggyback switch....and just every computer is plugged into the switches....if the DC is down, the only difference is I can't see my share drive and printers being served by it...well, I also have to change a setting on the router to get dhcp through it...but I have dhcp disabled normally....I just 'enable' it if I wasn't using the DC...but the DC i have is just a P3 500 with a scsi 2940 card with 2 hard drives attached....nothing fancy...do a backup like once a month of the system state to cdr. The data drive I backup to a workstation in the other room...real simple setup.
My computers never goes down...its just another computer....why do you guys keep saying stuff about it going down? I work on a lot of 50-100 employee networks that are just trashing exchange all day long and have giant files they work with over the network...you may see 'some' problems in this setup...but 2/2k3 server can laugh all day at a home network....it doesn't go down. It is being used for authentication, roaming profile, dns, dhcp, share drive access, and printers...not really anything else.
Do your XP boxes go down all the time? I haven't had a system die on me for a long long time....but I'm also into 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it' you have to have this motto if you work as an administrator--within reason, of course.
We are talking a simple DC not anything complicated....