Windows Server 2019 Standard Install
I have been meaning to install a Windows server or two to get my own active directory server going. That way I can get a little more experience and eventually domain join my computers to get easy setup for my computers. I got the iso’s and keys through going to the Azure website with my edu account from college and they give you some free licenses to mess around with. I could have used Windows server 2022 but I chose to go with Windows 2019 since I think that is more widely used at the moment and will emulate the server experience of many places better. I will just be talking about my choices and why I did them. This is because there are plenty of guides on how to install this and I will most likely make some wrong choices.
Initial Setup Of Server
I am installing the graphical version since I might eventually install some apps that need it and to make it little easier for me to navigate at first and since that is usually in the enterprise environment from my experience.
Setting up Domain Controllers
The first thing that I did after logging in was setup RDP to be enabled so that I could remote in from my computer. Then I set up the server roles to have all the AD services and the DNS server services.
I then promoted it to a domain controller and left most of everything was left default when configuring it. I did run into an issue because the certification server was installed and had to remove and re-add it back after promoting the server.
After that I created a second domain controller as is best practice with domain controllers. Basically just set it up as a domain controller and added it the domain. Adding in replication so that it was setup properly. I also had to follow this guide from microsoft Setting all objects to be protected from accidental deletion.
Setting up DNS (Domain Name Services)
This was a struggle for me since I did not have a thorough understanding of how windows server looks for BPA. I kept getting Errors about “DNS: DNS servers on Ethernet should include the loopback address but not as the first entry” which I knew I configured several times. After reading more about it this was happening because IPv6 was not configured but currently I only am using IPv4 in my current network setup
The main two things I did were just setting up the other DNS server as a DNS lookup for each server, then I setup the forwarders with my ISP, OpenDNS, and Google’s DNS servers.
Setting up Forward Lookup Zones
After that I just set up a few A records and am planning on setting up my whole network so that I can officially use that for my DNS internally.
As of now there are still several things that I have in mind to do.
- Self-Host Website
- Have VPN back to my home network
- Set up my servers in a server rack
- Get a third computer that will be able to break quorum between my two proxmox servers
- Setup a separate computer that will ping my servers and send wake up packets if it doesn’t get a response
- Self-host Bitwarden an open source password manager
- Setup a bare metal backup for Proxmox as a whole
- Setup a NAS that has at least 50 tb of storage
- Setup a personal documenting/notes such as something like Obsidian
- Setup a Windows server
- Fully Configure my DNS for my local internet