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Windows Server 2012 R2 Administrator Cookbook
Windows Server 2012 R2 Administrator Cookbook

Windows Server 2012 R2 Administrator Cookbook: Over 80 hands-on recipes to effectively administer and manage your Windows Server 2012 R2 infrastructure in enterprise environments

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Windows Server 2012 R2 Administrator Cookbook

Chapter 2. Core Infrastructure Tasks

Windows Server 2012 R2 has many roles and features that can be used to accomplish all sorts of different tasks in your network. This chapter reflects on the most common infrastructure tasks needed to create a successful Windows Active Directory environment by using Server 2012 R2:

  • Configuring a combination Domain Controller, DNS server, and DHCP server
  • Adding a second Domain Controller
  • Organizing your computers with Organizational Units (OUs)
  • Creating an A or AAAA record in DNS
  • Creating and using a CNAME record in DNS
  • Creating a DHCP scope to assign addresses to computers
  • Creating a DHCP reservation for a specific server or resource
  • Pre-staging a computer account in Active Directory
  • Using PowerShell to create a new Active Directory user
  • Using PowerShell to view system uptime

Introduction

There are a number of technologies in Windows Server 2012 R2 that are need to know if you plan to ever work in a Windows environment. These are technologies such as Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS), Domain Name System (DNS), and Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP). If you haven't noticed already, everything in the Windows world has an acronym. In fact, you may only recognize these items by their acronyms, and that's okay.

Nobody calls DHCP the Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol anyway. But do you know how to build these services and bring a Windows Server infrastructure online from scratch, with only a piece of hardware and a Windows Server 2012 R2 installation disc to guide your way? This is why we are here today. I would like to instruct you on taking your first server and turning it into everything that you need to run a Microsoft network.

Every company and network is different and has different requirements. Some will get by with a single server...

Configuring a combination Domain Controller, DNS server, and DHCP server

The directory structure that Microsoft networks use to house their users and computer accounts is called Active Directory (AD), and the directory information is controlled and managed by Domain Controller (DC) servers. Two other server roles that almost always go hand in hand with Active Directory are DNS and DHCP, and in many networks these three roles are combined on each server where they reside. A lot of small businesses have always made due with a single server containing all three of these roles, but in recent years virtualization has become so easy that almost everyone runs at least two Domain Controllers, for redundancy purposes. And if you are going to have two DCs, you may as well put the DNS and DHCP roles on them both to make those services redundant as well. But I'm getting ahead of myself. For this recipe, let's get started building these services by installing the roles and configuring them...

Adding a second Domain Controller

Active Directory is the core of your network. It has ties in everything! As such, it makes sense that you would want this to be as redundant as possible. In Windows Server 2012 R2, creating a secondary Domain Controller is so easy that you really have no reason not to do it. Can you imagine rebuilding your directory following a single server hardware failure where you have 100 user accounts and computers that are all part of the domain that just failed? That could take weeks to clean up, and you'll probably never get it back exactly the way it was before. Additionally, while you are stuck in the middle of this downtime, you will have all kinds of trouble inside your network since your user and computer accounts are relying on Active Directory, which would then be offline. Here are the steps to take a second server in your network and join it to the existing domain that is running on the primary DC to create our redundant, secondary Domain Controller...

Organizing your computers with Organizational Units (OUs)

Active Directory is the structure in which all of your user, computer, and server accounts reside. As you add new users and computers into your domain, they will be automatically placed into generic storage containers. You could get away with leaving all of your objects in their default locations, but there are a lot of advantages to putting a little time and effort into creating an organizational structure.

In this recipe, we will create some Organizational Units (OUs) inside Active Directory and move around our existing objects into these OUs so that we can create some structure.

Getting ready

We will need a Domain Controller online for this recipe, which is a Server 2012 R2 machine with the Active Directory Domain Services role installed. Specifically, I will be using the DC-01 server that we prepped in the Configuring a combination Domain Controller, DNS server, and DHCP server recipe.

How to do it...

Let's get comfortable working...

Creating an A or AAAA record in DNS

Most folks working in IT are familiar with using the ping command to test network connectivity. If you are trying to test the connection between your computer and another, you can ping it from a command prompt and test whether or not it replies. This assumes that the firewalls in your computers and network allow the ping to respond correctly, which generally is true. If you are inside a domain network and ping a device by its name, that name resolves to an IP address, which is the device's address on the network. But what tells your computer which IP address corresponds to which name? This is where DNS comes in. Any time that your computer makes a request for a name, whether it is you pinging another computer or your Outlook email client requesting the name of your Exchange Server, your computer always reaches out to your network's DNS servers and asks, "How do I get to this name?".

DNS contains a list of records that tell the computers...

Creating and using a CNAME record in DNS

Now that we are familiar with moving around a little bit inside the DNS management tool, we are going to create and test another type of record. This one is called a CNAME, and it is easiest to think of this one as an alias record. Rather than taking a DNS name and pointing it at an IP address as we do with a host record, with a CNAME we are going to take a DNS name and point it at another DNS name! Why would this be necessary? If you are hosting multiple services on a single server but want those services to be contacted by using different names, CNAME records can be your best friend.

Getting ready

We are going to make use of the same environment that we used to create our A records in the Creating an A or AAAA record in DNS recipe. There is a Domain Controller / DNS server online where we are going to create our records. Also running is WEB-01, a server where we are hosting a website as well as some file shares. We will also use a Windows 8 client...

Creating a DHCP scope to assign addresses to computers

In the Configuring a combination Domain Controller, DNS server, and DHCP server recipe, we installed the DHCP role onto a server called DC-01. Without some configuration, however, that role isn't doing anything. In most companies that I work with, all of the servers have statically assigned IP addresses, which are IPs entered by hand into the NIC properties. This way, those servers always retain the same IP address. But what about client machines that might move around, or even move in and out of the network? DHCP is a mechanism that the clients can reach out to in order to obtain IP addressing information for the network that they are currently plugged into.

This way, users or admins don't have to worry about configuring IP settings on the client machine, as they are configured automatically by the DHCP server. In order for our DHCP server to hand out IP addresses, we need to configure a scope.

Getting ready

We have a Server...

Introduction


There are a number of technologies in Windows Server 2012 R2 that are need to know if you plan to ever work in a Windows environment. These are technologies such as Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS), Domain Name System (DNS), and Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP). If you haven't noticed already, everything in the Windows world has an acronym. In fact, you may only recognize these items by their acronyms, and that's okay.

Nobody calls DHCP the Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol anyway. But do you know how to build these services and bring a Windows Server infrastructure online from scratch, with only a piece of hardware and a Windows Server 2012 R2 installation disc to guide your way? This is why we are here today. I would like to instruct you on taking your first server and turning it into everything that you need to run a Microsoft network.

Every company and network is different and has different requirements. Some will get by with a single server to host a...

Configuring a combination Domain Controller, DNS server, and DHCP server


The directory structure that Microsoft networks use to house their users and computer accounts is called Active Directory (AD), and the directory information is controlled and managed by Domain Controller (DC) servers. Two other server roles that almost always go hand in hand with Active Directory are DNS and DHCP, and in many networks these three roles are combined on each server where they reside. A lot of small businesses have always made due with a single server containing all three of these roles, but in recent years virtualization has become so easy that almost everyone runs at least two Domain Controllers, for redundancy purposes. And if you are going to have two DCs, you may as well put the DNS and DHCP roles on them both to make those services redundant as well. But I'm getting ahead of myself. For this recipe, let's get started building these services by installing the roles and configuring them for the first...

Adding a second Domain Controller


Active Directory is the core of your network. It has ties in everything! As such, it makes sense that you would want this to be as redundant as possible. In Windows Server 2012 R2, creating a secondary Domain Controller is so easy that you really have no reason not to do it. Can you imagine rebuilding your directory following a single server hardware failure where you have 100 user accounts and computers that are all part of the domain that just failed? That could take weeks to clean up, and you'll probably never get it back exactly the way it was before. Additionally, while you are stuck in the middle of this downtime, you will have all kinds of trouble inside your network since your user and computer accounts are relying on Active Directory, which would then be offline. Here are the steps to take a second server in your network and join it to the existing domain that is running on the primary DC to create our redundant, secondary Domain Controller.

Getting...

Organizing your computers with Organizational Units (OUs)


Active Directory is the structure in which all of your user, computer, and server accounts reside. As you add new users and computers into your domain, they will be automatically placed into generic storage containers. You could get away with leaving all of your objects in their default locations, but there are a lot of advantages to putting a little time and effort into creating an organizational structure.

In this recipe, we will create some Organizational Units (OUs) inside Active Directory and move around our existing objects into these OUs so that we can create some structure.

Getting ready

We will need a Domain Controller online for this recipe, which is a Server 2012 R2 machine with the Active Directory Domain Services role installed. Specifically, I will be using the DC-01 server that we prepped in the Configuring a combination Domain Controller, DNS server, and DHCP server recipe.

How to do it...

Let's get comfortable working...

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Description

This book is intended for system administrators and IT professionals with experience in Windows Server 2008 or Windows Server 2012 environments who are looking to acquire the skills and knowledge necessary to manage and maintain the core infrastructure required for a Windows Server 2012 and Windows Server 2012 R2 environment.

Who is this book for?

This book is intended for system administrators and IT professionals with experience in Windows Server 2008 or Windows Server 2012 environments who are looking to acquire the skills and knowledge necessary to manage and maintain the core infrastructure required for a Windows Server 2012 and Windows Server 2012 R2 environment.
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Publication date : Jan 28, 2015
Length: 310 pages
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Language : English
ISBN-13 : 9781784393076
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ISBN-13 : 9781784393076
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Table of Contents

11 Chapters
1. Learning the Interface Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
2. Core Infrastructure Tasks Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
3. Security and Networking Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
4. Working with Certificates Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
5. Internet Information Services Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
6. Remote Access Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
7. Remote Desktop Services Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
8. Monitoring and Backup Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
9. Group Policy Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
10. File Services and Data Control Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Index Chevron down icon Chevron up icon

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Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Half star icon 4.6
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4 star 15.4%
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2 star 7.7%
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abhimanyu singh rathore Apr 09, 2015
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
This book covers the topic which are the most needed for system admins, i definitely recommend this book
Amazon Verified review Amazon
William R James Jun 28, 2015
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
Simple, straight forward, meaningful, to the point, not long-winded.
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Charbel Nemnom Mar 05, 2015
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
I recommend this book for every IT Pro, you will know how to take your Windows Server 2012 R2 - powered server and turn it into any common infrastructure role that might be required in your organization.Get your copy today and enjoy!
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William Payne Mar 29, 2016
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Excellent book
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Charles W. Hayes Jul 14, 2016
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A great book for system admins.
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