Lion Cipher Lab

Set up an Active Directory home lab (Part 1: build the domain you own)

• Identity & Access Management
• Intermediate
• ~2-3 hours (mostly Windows installs running in the background)
• Free · no account required

Why it matters

Walk into almost any company, hospital, school, or government office and the computers, the logins, and the file shares are almost certainly run by Active Directory. Active Directory (AD) is Microsoft's system for centrally managing a whole network of Windows computers and the people who use them: instead of every machine keeping its own separate list of accounts, one place -- the DOMAIN -- holds the users, groups, and computers, and every machine that has 'joined the domain' trusts it to say who you are and what you may do. Because AD sits under the identity of nearly every large Windows…

What you'll learn

• what Active Directory, a domain, a domain controller, a forest, and an OU actually are, in plain words
• what a virtual machine (VM) and a hypervisor are, and running two Windows VMs at once
• where to download the FREE Windows Server evaluation ISO and the FREE Windows client evaluation ISO from Microsoft
• installing VirtualBox, the free hypervisor, and creating a Windows Server VM from an ISO
• building a host-only network so your whole lab is isolated and cannot reach (or be reached from) the internet
• giving the server a fixed IP address and installing the Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS) role
• promoting a plain Windows Server into a Domain Controller with Install-ADDSForest, which also installs DNS
• creating Organizational Units (OUs), user accounts, and groups in Active Directory Users and Computers (ADUC)
• creating a Windows client VM, pointing its DNS at the Domain Controller, and joining it to the domain
• proving success: logging in to the client as a domain user and seeing that user and computer in ADUC

Steps in this lab

1. First: this is YOUR lab, sealed off from everything else
2. The words you need first: domain, domain controller, forest, OU, DNS, LDAP
3. Install VirtualBox (the free hypervisor) on your own machine
4. Download the FREE Windows Server evaluation ISO
5. Build the isolated host-only network in VirtualBox
6. Create the Server VM and install Windows Server
7. Give the server a fixed IP address on the lab network
8. Install the AD DS role and promote the server to a Domain Controller
9. Create Organizational Units, users, and groups in ADUC
10. Download the FREE Windows client ISO and create the client VM
11. Point the client's DNS at the DC, then join it to the domain
12. Prove it worked: log in as a domain user and see it in ADUC
13. What you built, how to keep it, and where the series goes next

Open the full interactive lab →