Advice on Setting up a Server 2003 domain at home.

I have only been a technician for 9 months or so, I dint get much chance to play with the network/servers as everything runs fine and my NM keeps me at arms length. Trouble is he has no interest in any new stuff so eventually we will fall behind.

There is no money ( like most schools) for proper training so i an going to spend time myself.

I have spare machine at home that i am going to install server 2003 on. I need help configuring DNS, DHCP and AD settings. I have a netgear router on my network at home that the server will connect to to get its Internet.

How should i configure the server for best results bearing in mind that i will also install Exchange, WSUS ,ISA and possibly Sharepoint on a couple of old laptops i have borrowed from school for my two weeks holiday.

Any tips?

Just keep trying, and if it all goes tits up then don't worry you can re-format if you make a big mess as its not as if its a cricital thing. Don't forget if you making a DHCP server to isolate it from your LAN. Best way is 2 NICs in your server, one called External that gets its IP from your Router the other to a second hub / switch for your test network as you don't want it destroying your current home setup

If you can buy more ram for your PC and run VMware or virtual PC. It makes it a lot easier for test setups.

VMWare is great for this sort of stuff. I do a lot of testing/tinkering with network OSes in my spare time and have put 2GB of RAM in my home PC. I'm going to upgrade to a dual core chip soon, so this should make VM sessions run a bit more smoothly. Much easier and neater than having a bunch of PCs round the place and I just 'power up' the VMs when I want to use them.

I did use separate machines for this- but space and money mean that it's probably best to use VMWare or Virtual PC (now free). Now I do that- virtual machines all the way (but on OS X using Parallels). Either way it's a good way to learn in a safe environment. I would pick up Mastering Server 2003 by Mark Minasi or the Managing and Maintaining Server 2003 book by MS Press and just go at it from there. You'll learn a bucket load.

Hi Kyle.
From all my posts in the last few weeks you can probably tell I'm in it at the deep end .
I'm setting up a windows 2000 server for the first time for real for this charity run school, I set up and look after all there network for free .
I first set up W2k server software on an old Pentium 1 ( 250Mhz) just to see how to set it all up .
just did one bit at a time and if it did not work I went to the built in 'help' files and had a another go.

My home test network is:
W2K adv. server.Two workstations. second W2K server set up as a router ( just to see how it worked) they feed through a 4 way KVM switch in to one 17" monitor.
also two other old computers I can set up for testing things.
Old pen. 1 set up with Smoothwall (firewall) and a 8 way switch .
so you do not need any thing fancy it works well with old gear for my testing purposes.

I also found before I was told about this site, if you put the bit you want to set up into 'google'
eg. for DNS you would put something like ..... "setting up DNS on a Windows 2003 server"
and you will find some useful setting up tips.
From Michael.

Kyle,

If you've never set up a 2K or 2K3 server before then DNS can be a bit daunting. If it's a single server setup though, then the Active Directory installation wizard (DCPROMO) gives you the option to 'set up DNS on this server', which works well. Basically it does the following...

1 - Install the DNS Server service.
2 - Create a forward lookup 'zone' for the DNS domain you specified (e.g. yourdomain.int).
3 - Modifies the DNS properties in TCP/IP on the network adapter to point to the server itself.

To get your workstations working, you need to configure the DHCP server as follows;

1 - IP Address range (duh!)
2 - Scope properties; Default Gateway (usually your router)
3 - Scope properties; DNS Server - Set this as the IP of your new 2K3 server

When you boot your workstations, they will pick up an IP from DHCP and set their DNS client to point to the 2K3 server. The 2K3 server can now do DNS lookup for it's own domain (enabling workstations to logon) and it can usually take care of off-site lookups by using the root hints table.

If your ISP restricts DNS lookups to its own DNS servers, then you can set the 'forwarders' property on the DNS server to point to the DNS servers of your ISP. The 2K3 DNS server will resolve internal queries (relating to yourdomain.int) and pass others (eg www.google.co.uk) over the your ISP's DNS servers.

Why is DNS crucial? Only because 2000/2003/XP use it as the primary mechanism for finding services/hosts on the local network. When a 2K/2K3/XP domain participant starts up, it tries to find a domain controller using DNS. I think that if this fails a few times, then XP will still try a local broadcast to get a DC, but it's very inefficient.

Hope this helps.