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Lab02ADDS
In this lab we set up an Active Directory server. Configuration details are below.
Like any new box, at first I needed to do the initial setup for the computer. This involved cabling the box correctly (to my LAN) and starting it up, changing the name of the device, then setting up a new Local Admin Account and changing the password for the original Admin account. After that I verified that it connected to the internet (and had to troubleshoot the firewall when it didn't) and once there was connectivity, I could move on!
From there I pinned a few useful applications to the dock, and started making my new ad01-elizabeth into an Active Directory.
I opened up Server Manager, and after verifying that the IP information for the Local Server was correct, started the AD DS installation. I had to select "Add Roles and Features" and select Active Directory Domain Services as the things I wanted to install. After moving through the rest of the prompts, keeping them default, I selected the "restart destination server" option, then hit install.
Once that had installed I could select "promote this server to a domain controller" and in the Deployment Configuration box that came up finish setting up the server. I selected "add a new forest" and made the domain name "elizabeth.local," then set a DSRM password in case something goes wrong.
Then, I waited for everything to install and for the box to reboot itself. After the installation and reboot I was able to log in as a Domain Administrator and start configuring the domain.
Now that the box is an Active Directory running my own domain, I needed to add the firewall to it as a record, so any computer in the domain could lookup the firewall by its name. I started by opening DNS Manager from the Server Manager/DNS/AD01 menu, and from there I could create new records and Reverse Lookup Zones. After making a new Reverse Lookup Zone, I was able to make a New Host record for fw01-elizabeth so that ad01-elizabeth and wks01-elizabeth would be able to look it up. Creating this record also created a PTR in the Reverse Lookup Zone, since I had already made somewhere for that to go.
I also needed to create a few users that could use my new domain! To do this I started by opening up "Active Directory Users and Computers" from Server Manager/AD DS/AD01. In the "Users" tab I could easily create two new users, one Domain Admin named elizabeth.chadbourne-adm (added to the Domain Admins group) and one normal, unprivileged user simply named elizabeth.chadbourne.
Getting wks01 to join elizabeth.local started by setting the DNS server IP address in wks01 to ad01's address (10.0.5.5) so that it would look to ad01 for its domain name queries. After confirming with pings to the firewall and the domain itself, and double checking that wks01 was properly named to WKS01-ELIZABETH it was time to officially join it to the domain.
In the system properties of wks01 (where you would normally change the name) you can also add it to a domain. From there I could add it to elizabeth.local and use my Domain Admin credentials to confirm the new addition, and it was in and working! I was later able to test that the domain worked by signing in to wks01 with both sets of elizabeth.local credentials.
An Active Directory is an organizational system or structure that stores information on a network to be later recalled. There are a number of services that fall under an Active Directory, such as Active Directory Domain Services, or AD DS (I was wondering what those letters actually stood for; I couldn't remember if we covered it in the lecture in class). AD DS specifically stores information relating to people and accounts, such as names and usernames, passwords, phone numbers, privileges on the domain, and more. In my experience they are generally used in enterprise networks for businesses and institutions (like Champlain College) in order to manage user permissions and computer labs or workstations.
Simply put, DNS is a process for putting an IP address (the kind of name computers understand) to a given hostname, such as champlain.edu or youtube.com. The 4 servers used in resolving (or finding the correct name for) a hostname are the DNS recursor, the Root nameserver, the Top Level Domain (TLD) nameserver, and the Authoritative nameserver. A query goes up through the heirarchy to find the correct IP address for it's hostname to connect to.
Source: https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/dns/what-is-dns/
I wanted to do some more research on this since I had never heard this term before. Varonis.com said that a forest is the "top most logical container in an Active Directory configuration that contains domains, users, computers, and group policies." (Paragraph 1). Now the way I understand this is that a forest is bigger than a domain, and can be used to not only manage multiple domains, but also all of the stuff the domains themselves manage like domain users and their privileges, and the computers that are a part of each domain.
I understand more now why the Server Manager software had us make a new "forest" for our domain, because it needed a way to manage that domain without just being the domain. It needed to be above it in the hierarchy. That is how I understand it anyway.
Source: https://www.varonis.com/blog/active-directory-forest