Contents
These Active Directory workshops ran over three days and aimed to cover the basics of Active Directory, focussing primarily on areas that are likely to be of most interest and use to ITSS staff setting up AD domains in their departments and colleges. Where possible, common tasks, problems and experiences to date were detailed (especially in the area of DNS and naming.) The workshops included practical sessions to cover most of the common tasks.
The workshops were open to all IT support staff and were aimed primarily at staff who are either already running an Active Directory service, or installing Active Directory or planning on installing Active Directory.
The talks are available on the web in PowerPoint format (v95 and above.) Please note that some of the later presentations were written during the course and are incomplete. They are included here by popular demand, and the gaps will be filled in as soon as possible. There is also at least one particularly horrible sentence in the DNS slides that will one day be rewritten to make sense.
The practicals are also available online. I think that they should more or less stand up on their own if you want to take them and work through them in your college/department. Ideally you will need three test PCs — two for Windows 2000 server and one running Windows 2000 Professional. The latter could be someone’s desktop PC running 2000 since in general it is used in a non-destructive manner to test the effects of Group Policy. You will have to work through the first day’s practicals before everything else will work since these cover the basic setup. The one thing that will have to be changed is the DNS setup which was very carefully set up in the Lecture Room and depended on correct DNS configuration on the front desk PC. Following the DNS practical blindly will not work. There are two main methods of getting around this.
NB there were some errors in the practical sessions and I have not yet checked through and corrected all of them. If you are trying these out yourselves, remember to substitute the correct name of your domain where appropriate.