Active Directory Domain Services (ADDS)

What is Active Directory Domain Services?

Active Directory Domain Services is a Microsoft Windows server-based directory service that manages and stores information about network resources and facilitates the organization and management of users, computers, and other network objects within a network.

Installing AD DS Roles

Open Server Manager » Add Roles and Features, select Active Directory Domain Services and DNS Server

Just choose next until the install window shows up. Click install

Promoting Domain Controller

After the roles are added, select Promote this server to a domain controller

Select add new forest, and give it a root domain name

Give it a password

The wizard might shows that it cannot create DNS delegation. That’s fine we’ll deal with it later

Give it a NETBIOS name

On prerequisites check, click install

The server will restart, and after that the AD DS configuration should conclude

Configuring DNS

Open DNS Manager, make sure the helena.com zone is present

On Reverse Lookup Zone, right click and add new, select Primary Zone

Add the subnet of the network. If there are more than one, just repeat the process

Or we can just use a very broad subnet of 198, meaning it will cover all subnets on with 198.x.x.x

Joining other PC to the Domain

Song long the DNS is pointed to the domain controller, we can now join the domain from other PC in the network, which is XS2 here.

On Computers list on helena.com, we can see XS2 is now listed

And it is also resolvable on the domain search of helena.com