Gutting and Redoing My Network...Finally

I finally got some spare time recently (can’t emphasize the word finally enough), and for some reason I decided it was time to redo my aging network topology.  For the first time in about 4 years, I flattened my “server” (meaning an XP installation hosting a Windows 2003 Server Virtual PC instance running my sites) for a fresh copy of Win2k3.  The sheer amount of crap I had accumulated on that machine over the years was staggering…but that’s another story.  I salvaged some of it, quickly lost patience, and just formatted the sucker.  I will say this; without VPC my sites would have been down for the better part of 2 days…moving the VPC image to another machine meant downtime more in the area of 30 minutes (the amount of time it took to copy 15 gigs over the wire)…what a godsend.

I then had the brilliant idea that I needed to set up a proper domain for myself…brilliant in that this will seriously cut down my administrative overhead, not so brilliant in that I know not a whole lot about domains and I quickly ran into trouble (I took some Windows 2000 classes about 5 years ago…you know, DNS/DHCP/Group Policy/etc; the stuff that most developers usually don’t get involved with).  The first mistake I made was naming my new domain jaysonknight.com…the same as my internet domain.  This caused some DNS issues in that I couldn’t get my internet domain to resolve internally as it was pointing towards the DC’s IP address.  Bob helped out tremendously with this, ran dcpromo again and per his recommendation named the domain jaysonknight.local.  That cleared up the DNS issues.

After setting up the correct DNS stuff (forward/reverse lookup zones/root hints/DNS forwarding) and the DHCP stuff (address pool/static leases for webservers/well known services/etc), I had another brilliant idea (again, using the term brilliant very loosely) to install Virtual Server to host the different servers I plan on installing.  I cannot stress enough how friggin’ awesome this software is…seeing is believing, so if you haven’t played around with Virtual Server it’s definitely worth a look…100% web based administration and a very slick interface to boot.  The only downside is that installing a guest OS took about 4 hours (compared to about an hour for a physical machine)…the upside of that being once you have a base installation, they are very easy to reuse; getting new instances up and running is as easy as copying the image to a new directory and attaching it to VS (and renaming it/.  The only other snag I ran into was that I misconfigured DHCP to not exclude the address of my router, so the first guest OS I installed got assigned that address and I was down until the installation completed so I could reassign a proper IP.  I had put an entry into DNS for the router, plus it was listed in the well known services section of DHCP so I didn’t think that Windows would be silly enough to assign that address to another machine.  I guess I was the silly one.

All that’s left to do is copy over my sites and databases to the new VS instance and I’ll be back up and running.  Next on the list of things to do is get my other machines on the domain (and profiles moved), tighten up security, get VPN/RDP up and running…then it’s time to tackle the big bad world of Exchange so I can get OWA up and running (and finally get myself a proper email address for my internet domain name).  Why do I want to do all of this myself?  Besides being a glutton for punishment, I just like learning about stuff.

This concludes what is probably the most boring post I’ve ever penned…if you made it this far, kudos.  Any Exchange/Win2k3 experts feel free to make yourselves known as more than likely I will run into issues down the line somewhere.