The Past few Days I have been doing some development work with Liam,
We started by downloading windows server, I chose windows server 2008 R2 and Liam chose Windows Server 2012 R2,
Over the course of a night we both installed our own copies of windows servers onto spare machines we had, we had many issues in the process but eventually made everything work.
I had a spare HP with a 3.46 GHz celeron and 1.5GB of ram so I used this for my project, I chose server 2008 r2 and not 2012 due to the matter of Ram, luckily it ran well enough for a test bench server.
For a while now (about 3 years on and off) I have tried to setup active directory but failed connecting the client to the machine due to dns issues, after doing a bit of googling online i discovered that dns on the client had to be setup to mirror to the IP address of the server,
I remembered that I had previously installed windows 7 on my Apple Server prior so booted the virtual machine up, I then proceeded to change the dns settings to that of the active directory server (The 2008 r2 machine).
I proceeded to change the dns addresses and make sure the connection was bridged and almost instantly windows 7 found the server I had just set up,
I proceeded to connect it and then restarted, when it rebooted the system had bound to the active directory and allowed me to login with my credentials.
I was able to sign in onto the user profile first time and this gave me a great sense of pride, after achieving this I decided to see what else I could do, I had a look at the roles on my windows server and realised I could setup a network drive(SMB Share) and Remote Desktop (RDP) as well as other roles.
The Next day I woke up and decided to setup remote access, I succeeded straight away and as a result was able to remote desktop into the server via my various Macs on my home network;
I setup a static IP and created a quick access Remote Desktop on Windows Remote Desktop for mac, this allowed me to administer the server whenever without actually being in front of the machine, I decided having teamviewer installed could possibly also be beneficial so I also did this and linked it to my existing computers within the client.
I quickly realised using different users you could access the same profile twice at the same time, via teamviewer and remote desktop, other profiles can also be setup for multiple virtual computer access connections at the same time but the server needs serious resources to run remotely on multiple machines simultaneously, this was a big breakthrough for me and I was hooked on finding out more.
I helped Liam achieve active directory and remote desktop on his windows server and windows computer setup over Facetime and teamviewer each night I progressed, after a very beneficial few nights of learning he achieved the same setup after learning the server 2012 r2 interface which took a little longer due to the fact it was very different to server 2008 r2.
I decided that having a backup system could also help so I decided to set up a network drive, I created a volume named ‘Network Share 1’ on the server (win123@finnmctiernan.local) and used the ip/hostname of the server to access it on my macs, I then backed up precious data for redundancy over the SMB protocol.
I have now made the pc a permanent very useful component of my network and feel a great sense of achievement not only by the ability to help others develop their skills but what I had achieved myself.
Thanks For Reading, Finn McTiernan