Hi Allzz,

Here is a short tutorial a co-worker wrote when I was working at a PC repair internship (USA PC Techs). This project was a collaboration but Joe Kulp actually wrote this guide. All you need is one server (Windows Server) and a windows client.

Setting up a domain Written by: Joe Kulp

This is an overview in a step by step format for installing a small business domain.

1. Install your flavor of Windows Network Operating system.
2. Upon completion you need to set up the proper time zone and time/date settings, if you do not this could cause issues within Active Directory
3. Next a static IP-address is needed to be set, using 192.168.x.x is advisable since this is a private IP-address, and an example of a valid IP-address would be 192.168.17.100.  Make this a number you can remember easily because it will be needed in steps later in this overview.
4. The default subnet mask is fine, for our example it would be 255.255.255.0
5. Set the default gateway to whatever the IP-address is for your router, this will forward and packets to the router to be sent outside of the network.
6. Set your preferred DNS server to the router’s IP-address also, this will send any information not meant for the server on to the DNS server to be translated into an IP-address
7. Install Active Directory on the server.
8. After Active Directory is installed you need to promote the server to the Domain Controller (DC).  To do this, open up the command prompt and type in the command dcpromo.exe; this will run the Domain Controller promotion program built into Windows.
9. From here it is a step by step process for setting up your domain.
10. Follow the prompts reading the information carefully, when it gets to the portion of the setup where it wants you to name your domain, you should use a simple to remember Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN), since you are setting up a small business domain you DO NOT need to purchase a .com or .org to complete the setup.  Use the following example as a guide for your FQDN: domain17.local
11. Complete the Domain set up utility with the default settings from here out.
12. Reboot the system.
13. After boot you will notice in Active Directory you now have your domain ready to be administered to add users and computers.
14. In order to have our small business domain functioning properly we need to now install the Windows Internet Name Service (WINS) on our server.  What the WINS does is it captures any requests for the domain17.local, anything else it forwards to the DNS server that is specified under preferred DNS server that we set up earlier.
15. After WINS is set up you will notice it has its own IP-address.  Make note of this IP-address for we will need it later when setting up client computers.
16. You can now move to setting up client computers.  To connect them to the domain you must first make sure it has a valid IP-address set up by the router’s Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) server.  This should put it in the same network as the server.
17. Now you must change the preferred DNS server to the IP-address we noted for the WINS server.
18. After completing this step open up My Computer, then right click anywhere on the background, then navigate to properties.  This will open up the system properties, next click on the Change Settings button under Computer Name, Domain, and Workgroup settings.
19. Next click on the Change button next to the “To rename this computer or change its domain or workgroup”.  First change the name of the computer to something in a standard format, an example of this would be office-pc1.
20. Now click the radio button next to “Domain:”  Now type in the name of your domain, our example is domain17.local
21. After clicking OK it will ask for your credentials, use the username Administrator and whatever your administrator password is on your server.
22. If done properly it should take a few seconds then the message “Welcome to domain17.local”
23. You should now be able to access information from the Server such as files and Active Directory.