Active Directory is a set of Microsoft created services that work together to create a centralized administration server for a network, used to manage what computers, users, and groups have access to in an environment.
Active Directory plays a big role in almost every medium to large company’s IT infrastructure and management, so having a solid understanding of the fundamental and even some hands-on experience is a great thing to have.
To gain experience I decided I would create a virtual machine on my Proxmox server running Windows Server 2022.
I installed the Windows Server ISO image from Microsoft and got my Virtual Machine all set up. I selected the correct version of Windows Server. Upon completion of installation, I set a password and logged in for the first time.
When I logged in initially, I set up a static IPv4 address, default gateway, and DNS settings. After configuring IPv4 information, I tested my connectivity by pinging googles DNS server and my default gateway.
Now I launched the server manager application and configured my new domain. I wanted to keep it simple so I set my domain name to WIN. I then finished configuration and rebooted.
And upon rebooting my computer I can see that my Administrator account was added to the WIN domain and my configuration was successful!
With my domain set up I now wanted to focus on creation and administration of computers, users, and groups. I launched the Active Directory Users and Computers tab in server manager and started looking and learning all of the built in groups.
I decided to create different organizational units to mimic the layout of an enterprise network. A company might have organizational units like HR, IT, and Sales, so I decided to create these three categories. After creating these categories I started administering new user profiles and passwords, adding two people to each department. For usernames I used the first letter of the users first name and their last name, so my username would be cfuller.
With the users and departments created, my next step is going to be logging onto one of the newly created user accounts and joining the domain on my Windows 11 PC. I am going to log onto Cody Fuller from the IT department’s account. To do this I need to edit my network adapter settings. I need to configure my adapter to look to my Windows Server for DNS. Once I did this I, I added the computer to my WIN.local domain and logged in with the administrator account to set it up. From here I reboot the PC for the changes to take effect, and I am able to log on using the Cody Fuller domain credentials!
