Active Directory Course Project

To prepare you to take the MCSE Exam and to provide a final opportunity to practice what you have learned in this course, we have designed a case study, which requires you to implement the skills taught in this course. The casestudy appears in the final module in this course. The course project consists of a series of exercises in which you will respond to scenarios and troubleshoot various network problems that occur within a fictitious company, TACteam, Inc, an international training and consulting company. You will be taking the role of an enterprise administrator and solving a series of problems that will help you demonstrate your ability to administer a network effectively and efficiently. Along the way, you will have access to important resources in a case file illustrated below that will help you make decisions and complete each task.

Mock company. You might see information about the number of employees, the location of the home office and remote offices, some basic information about the number of users and the types of machines they are using. TACteam, Inc. is an International Training and Consulting company presenting running Windows Server Domain Controllers and Servers and Windows 10 clients. TACteam provides consulting and training services for moderate to large size companies through the United States and Europe. They have a full-time workforce of 5000 and 2500 part-time employees. The Main Office for TACteam is in Dallas, Texas. They also have Regional locations in San Francisco, Boston, and London. Dallas is connected to San Francisco and Boston via a Virtual Private Network using a T1 link to the Internet. They also have a 56k Frame Relay connection to London. There are a total of 10,000 computers in use at the company. 4000 are in Dallas, 2500 in San Francisco and Boston, and 1000 in London. There are approximately 500 laptops that are in active use that connected to the network via dial-up L2TP/IPSec connections.

• Network History: You will find information about the history of the particular network you are working on. You might see, for example, a message describing recent problems on the network, or you might see messages like those demonstrated below:
  
  1. The network has been having no problems for the last two weeks. Yesterday, before you left for the day, you configured a new scope on the DHCP server for the new segment you installed on the network. All the users on the new segment will be using those computers for the first time.
  2. The network has been running smoothly since the upgrade to Windows 10 Professional workstations and Windows 10 Servers. There had been some minor problems with the DHCP Server, but those were handled quickly and did not create any significant amount of downtime.
  3. The network has been experiencing very few problems in the last two weeks. The only issues have been some occasional router configuration problems which were resolved within a couple of hours after coming to your attention.

Requirements and specifications for Windows Azure the particular system on which you are working. As demonstrated below, for example, you might find information about where the 2000 Professional installation files are located, or where you should place your temp files.

1. The Windows 10 Professional installation files are on two computers named INSTALL-PRO1 and INSTALL-PRO2 and the Windows 10 Server installation files are located on INSTALL-SRV1 and INSTALL-SRV2. There are computers with these names in each domain.
2. The I386 folder, which contains the Windows 10 installation files, will be placed on servers in each domain.
3. The temp files should be placed on drive D: for both the Windows 10 Professional and Windows 10 Server upgrades.
4. The names of the unattended installation files are unattendpro.txt (for the Windows 10 Professional upgrades) and unattendsvr.txt (for the Windows 10 Server upgrades.)
5. You want the system to wait 10 seconds before rebooting.

• Systems Architecture
  You will find information about the architecture of the system. The architecture will be constantly revised as you progress through the course project exercises.
  1. The network runs only Windows 2012 Server and Windows 2019 Server Software. Machines are from a variety of different vendors, and run a number of different hardware configurations. All machines and network devices run 10/100 Ethernet.
  2. The new segment has been assigned the Network ID of 192.168.3.0. You have configured an address pool, exclusion range, and scope options. All machines are connected to each other via 10/100 Ethernet 10BaseT hubs and switches. You have disabled NetBIOS on all the machines on the network because your network consists of all Windows 10 machines after the tacteam.net upgrade and you have no applications that require NetBIOS.
  3. The network runs only Windows 2012 Server and Windows Server 2019 Software. Machines are from a variety of different vendors, and run a number of different hardware configurations. All machines and network devices run 10/100 Ethernet.

There are many different types of directories, including Internet white pages, email systems, and even the Domain Name System. Although each of these systems has characteristics of a directory service, X.500 and the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) define the standards for how a true directory service is implemented and accessed.

• X.500
  The X.500 was never needed by most clients, and this prevented large-scale adoption. It was for this reason that a group headed by the University of Michigan started work on a "lightweight" X. 500 access protocol that would make X.500 easier to utilize. The first version of the (LDAP) Lightweight Directory Access Protocol was released in 1993 as Request for Comments (RFC) 1487, but due to the absence of many features provided by X.500, it did not gain traction.
  It was not until LDAPv2 was released in 1995 as RFC 1777 that LDAP started to gain popularity. Prior to LDAPv2, the primary use of LDAP was as a gateway between X.500 servers. Simplified clients would interface with the LDAP gateway, which would translate the requests and submit them to the X. 500 server. The University of Michigan team thought that if LDAP could provide most of the functionality necessary to most clients, they could remove the the gateway and develop an LDAP-enabled directory server. This directory server could use many of the concepts from X.500, including the data model, but would leave out all the overhead resulting from the numerous features it implemented. Thus, the first LDAP directory server was released in late 1995 by the University of Michigan team, and it turned into the basis for many future directory servers.
  In 1997, the last major update to the LDAP specification, LDAPv3, was described in RFC 2251. It provided several new features and made LDAP robust enough and extensible enough to be suitable for most vendors to implement. Since then, companies such as Netscape, IBM, the OpenLDAP Foundation, and Microsoft have developed LDAP-based directory servers. Most recently, RFC 3377 was released, which lists all of the major LDAP RFCs.

Now that we have given you a brief overview of the origins of Active Directory, we will leave you to read ahead and learn more about Active Directory in the comming modules. Throughout the rest of this online course, we will bring you up to speed with what you need to know to successfully support Active Directory as well as to design an effective Active Directory implementation. Next, you will begin the first part of the course.