I took it upon myself last week to start setting up my home network. No, I don't mean the wiring or the router, etc., but actually setting up some sort of menial infrastructure, servers and all. I had originally planned to just move my web hosting to a box at home, and then figured I'd give email a shot too so I'm not paying anything out of pocket. At the same time, my wife and I both like the features of Exchange, so I figured why not go all out and set up an AD domain at home while I'm at it.
Since this is really a very small and very trivial network, I figured an old laptop running Win2k3 Server would do fine, along with Exchange 2007, IIS for web hosting and also have it be the one and only domain controller on the network.
Other than taking forever and a day to install and update Win2k3, I thought there would be a heck of a lot more to setting up an AD domain. Unless I'm missing something, all it is is setting up DNS, installing and configuring AD (in this example very rudimentary), and then installing additional services (IIS, File Serving, Printer Serving, etc which I'm still in the process of doing). I've worked with AD for some time from the admin side, but I've never actually set a domain up from scratch. Is this really all there is to it for a small network? I have to be missing something, otherwise why do people think AD is "da debil"?
Since this is really a very small and very trivial network, I figured an old laptop running Win2k3 Server would do fine, along with Exchange 2007, IIS for web hosting and also have it be the one and only domain controller on the network.
Other than taking forever and a day to install and update Win2k3, I thought there would be a heck of a lot more to setting up an AD domain. Unless I'm missing something, all it is is setting up DNS, installing and configuring AD (in this example very rudimentary), and then installing additional services (IIS, File Serving, Printer Serving, etc which I'm still in the process of doing). I've worked with AD for some time from the admin side, but I've never actually set a domain up from scratch. Is this really all there is to it for a small network? I have to be missing something, otherwise why do people think AD is "da debil"?