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Vazgen
Asked: 2012-10-29 23:26:06 +0800 CST

Configuring a Domain Controller for an Internal Domain in Windows Server 2012

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I'm looking to create a domain called "developer.domain.com" to join computers to. I need to make a domain controller for this domain in Windows Server 2012, this is my first time. What are the steps? So far I have researched and pulled together steps from different sources but I don't know if I'm missing any steps or if some steps don't apply to me. Please review:

  1. Register "domain.com"

  2. Configured server IP to be static (say 192.168.1.3). ----Should I set the preferred DNS servers in this configuration to the same thing they were before? Im guessing that's my ISP's DNS servers and I should leave it the same as before?

  3. Installed ADDS and DNS roles.

  4. Add domain to Forward Look Up Zones: DNS Manager -> Forward LookUp Zones -> New Zone for "domain.com" (primary)

  5. Create A record for subdomain: Refresh -> Forward Look Up Zones -> domain.com -> create New Host(A or AAAA) record for "developer.domain.com" ----- Is this supposed to point to the static IP I just made in step 1?

  6. Create A records for nameservers: -----What IPs should the name server A records point to? Same server IP as "developer.domain.com"?

  7. Create NS records for nameservers: Refresh -> Forward Look Up Zones - > domain.com -> Properties -> NameServers tab -> Add ns1.domain.com -> Resolve -> Add ns2.domain.com -> Resolve

  8. Add nameservers in Internet Registrar settings

After all this can I join computers to domain?

subdomain

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    You should own the domain you're using, so in your example, you need to own domain.com. You do not, however, need to create any DNS entries for it, either on your internal LAN or externally.

    If you're installing AD from scratch then you can just go ahead and install the AD Domain Services role on your server. You just supply the domain name developer.domain.com as the AD domain name.

    You'll be prompted to install DNS as part of the AD installation process, say yes to this offer and it should install DNS and create the appropriate entries for you. DO NOT try and use the ISP's DNS for your domain controller or your clients. You can have your local DNS forward requests to the ISP DNS but the sever and its clients need to use the AD server's own DNS server to find each other for your local network to work properly.

    While its possible to do the DNS configuration by hand, if you've never installed AD before then I'd strongly suggest letting the AD install process do this for you then looking at what its done afterwards.

    This is all you need to do to create a domain that you can join computers to in a network. There's a lot of "best practice" stuff you should really be doing as well (you really should have more than one DC for a start) but this is the basic 'get you started' level.

    You might find this question useful for AD background too.

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