"Ah, but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now."
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Tuesday, March 12
Location, Location, Location
I don't mean for this blog to turn into Frustrated Technician Weekly, but this is stuff that's been on my mind lately. Now the latest installment of "Learn About Windows 2000 - The Hard Way!"
Windows 2000 has a tool called Sites and Services that lets you create multiple "sites", defined by IP subnets, and add servers to each site. This ensures Active Directory traffic goes to the "nearest" site, in terms of bandwidth or availability, and doesn't swamp the wide area links. You can also use it to partition a network at a single geographic site to spread login traffic over multiple servers.
When I was down in Houston last week (see this post), I set up their server as a domain controller for a new domain, and created a new site for it. After I got back I wanted to set up a server here as a controller for the new domain. Here I ran into my first problem: NAT. The domain controller promotion tool (appropriately called dcpromo.exe) won't work if the other domain controller is on a server running network address translation. So, I had to run some command to turn of NAT for the appropriate protocol, and I created the new server as a domain controller.
Now I ran into Problem Number Two. When Active Directory added the new controller to a site, it put it in the same site as the existing controller. This was trouble, since that site was both physically distant and on a different subnet. Headaches galore as I fooled around with various site links, ran Sites and Services against different controllers, etc. etc. Finally I had a brainstorm - I added a new IP address on a new subnet to each of the domain controllers at my home site, then added the new subnet to the remote site. Now the new server could talk to the existing servers, and I had things wrapped up in short order.
In Other News: I had lunch with Terri and Judy from Venture Training today. It looks as though I'm really going to be teaching some classes over there. We're going to start out with just some A+ Certification prep and Windows 2000 courses, and see how it goes. I'm really kind of excited about it. I think I'm going to like it, and more money never hurts. Of course, it means an additional 40 hours of work per month (at least!), and I'm not sure how that's going to affect my home life. I guess I'll find out.
