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Category: technical
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Published on Wednesday, 08 February 2012 20:48
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Over the past few weeks, we have consistently had an hour or two free each day. As efforts to get some online training haven't yet been approved, we've decided to take matters into our own hands and train ourselves as best as possible.
Around my work area, there are a number of "disposed" workstations and old servers. I have taken the initiative to salvage what can be salvaged, and to turn these workstations into a training server environment. The object was to create a Windows Server 2008 environment, which would be a hands on area to learn and practice server administration. It should simulate real client networks, but be effectively isolated from the real world. (read: a safe place to make mistakes, and to learn both what happens when the mistake is made, and how to correct the mistake, without actually knocking down a client site).
In light of this, I can share a few lessons already learned.
- don't add your dhcp & dns server to Network Load Balancing clusters, unless you really know what you're doing. I added the first two servers to an NLB cluster, and before I realized what went wrong, both servers became inaccessible from the network. (these two servers were serving different roles, and were not identically configured).
- you need to run "dcpromo" from command prompt in order to promote a server to domain controller.
- you'll probably need to run "adprep /forestprep" and "adprep /domainprep" as well, and you'll need more than just domain admin rights to do it.
- DFS (Distributed File System) is just a fancy way of putting a bunch of network shares into one logical share name. Eg. \\serverone\shareone$ & \\servertwo\sharetwo$ & \\serverthree\sharethree$ become visible all in one folder: \\dfsnameservername\folderwithlistofshares$
- If you want these folders to replicate so that each server has an uptodate copy, you'll need to set up replication in addition to DFS.
