As the semester comes to its conclusion, so does our project. We chose to build an Active Directory domain because it is an industry standard in the field of systems administration. During the last few months, we have learned a lot about the creation and management of a domain. Challenges were presented in the form of limited resources or systems not acting as we’d expected.
Due to time and resource limitations, we weren’t able to implement a number of additional features, including but not limited to:
- A 3rd client VM running Windows 8.1
- Software deployment (e.g. Service Center Configuration Manager/SCCM)
- Windows Deployment
- Web content filtering (e.g. BlueCoat)
There were some things I wish we had done differently, such as the organization of Group Policy. A few of the GPOs became rather large and broad which can lead to confusion on what policies they contain. However, for the most part we did utilize smaller GPOs with a focused purpose (e.g. Start Menu Access, Limited Control Panel, etc).
Overall, I feel that this project has improved upon my existing systems administration experience and has helped prepared me for my career as an IT systems administration professional. I’d like to build a home-lab server running a VMWare hypervisor which will allow me to perform projects like this again with full control over the environment.
