Day 6 Active Directory

Day 6 Blog Post – Installing Active Directory

Today’s task involved installing and configuring active directory on our server and then joining our Windows 7 workstations to our domain.
As this was new to me I found it useful to research a bit of background into active directory. What is it? What function does it perform? Why is it necessary were all burning questions. As I read through various links this short explanation from Wikipedia proved to be very helpful in building my understanding of active directory.


“An Active Directory structure is a hierarchical arrangement of information about objects. The objects fall into two broad categories: resources (e.g., printers) and security principals (user or computer accounts and groups). Security principals are assigned unique security identifiers (SIDs).




After reading up a bit on active directory last night I was ready for Lyle’s explanation and I had no trouble understanding him. His explanation of the “root of the forest” and “trees” in the forest helped me to understand the analogy. The head of the network is the root and all of our networks are trees in the forest. Forest is a synonym for network.

Installing active directory was a pretty straightforward process composed of two main parts. Installing and configuring the software on our Windows 2008 server then joining our Windows 7 workstations to the domain. The latter half of the procedure would prove to be the most challenging.


Once we executed the commands to bring up the active directory wizard we went through the prompts and successfully completed the installation. Afterward it was time to join our workstations to the domain.

I found this video to be particularly helpful in joining our workstations to the domain.




We ran into problems because our machines were unable to find the domain. We tried various things to rectify the problem such as refreshing our DHCP settings on the server, rebooting, checking for updates, ipconfig in the command prompt, pinging our machines, etc all to no avail. Finally, we enlisted the help of classmates and Lyle and we were able to make a connection at the end of the class. We continued to work on creating our objects and user accounts and I am looking forward to completing the task tomorrow.