Re: Windows domain education

Those expenses are out of the question at this point. I'm looking to learn
basic stuff so I don't need the consultant except for when it's something
substantial.

That's the way it is in a 1-person IT shop. Especially when you're a
corporate VP and you consider yourself a businessman first and an IT person
second.


On Tue, Jul 21, 2009 at 4:07 PM, Lukas Beeler <lukas.beeler@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

wrote:

On Tue, Jul 21, 2009 at 21:17, Jeff Crosby<jlcrosby@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

We switched from a workgroup to a domain over the weekend. Now I need

some

education in Windows domains, active directory, group policy, and that

ilk.

Well, what exactly of this? Especially group policy is an extremely
powerful tool, though using it for simple tasks is easy. But it's easy
to shoot yourself in the foot.

1) Something that gives a basic overview - to get me started

Well, how do you learn? Many people i know learn using books, but i
don't. So here's my suggestion.

Get your company to pay for a TechNet subscription. We're talking
about 500$ a year or so, maybe even cheaper with rebates and the
different pricing across the pond. This will give you the ability to
test around with all the software you might want to test, without
having to deal with expiring evaluation versions.

Get a piece of hardware on which you can run virtualization on. It
might make sense to use Hyper-V, which is virtualization functionality
included in WS08. If you're using VMware, ESXi is free. A machine that
can do this will run you roughly 1000$. Make sure to get lots of RAM
(8GB or more).

This will allow you to setup a test environment to see how things
work. Make sure it's completely isolated from your production
environment using a firewall. And then get cracking. It might make
sense to get into a Microsoft community somewhere in case you need
help, because there you'll probably get more feedback than here. Of
course i'm happy to respond to any questions on PC-TECH ;)

Active Directory has a lot of interdependencies of knowledge - it
depends heavily on DNS and Kerberos, and the vital database is plain
LDAP. This is all stuff you MIGHT already know from the i - if you
don't, you have a long and interesting road ahead of you.

Free tip about group policy: All the group policy stuff is basically
done by the client. The server isn't involved that much, it just
provides files and information through LDAP. It doesn't push anything.

gpupdate / gpresult / userenv.log (XP) or Eventlogs (Vista and up)
will tell you mostly everything you need.

2) A complete definite reference, if such a thing exists - and you think

I'm

smart enough to not make willy-nilly changes
Suggestions? Does Microsoft put out the definitive reference?

TechNet is actually quite good:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/default.aspx

But i prefer using Google / Bing searches to solve my problems, and
usually just read TechNet articles when i'm informing myself about a
product, not when trying to resolve a specific issue.

One annoyance so far that has happened at 5 or more PCs as reported to

me.

When you log off the domain, Num Lock goes off. I have confirmed this
happens at my PC. Is there a domain wide setting that's causing this?

It

just started this week and since every password has a digit in it, it's a
pain..

The digit keys are right above the letters... :P

But honestly - resolving this problem is simple - there's soo much
information out there.

http://www.lmgtfy.com/?q=numlock+windows+logon

Led me directly here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314879

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