CISCOACA.local (Retired)

Our Domain Setup

The CISCOACA.local domain is setup to run off of the servers called Loki and Logan. The both run Active Directory, DNS, and DHCP. Loki is configured as the main server by default, and Logan is configured as the hot standby. They will failover or trade roles if there is ever an issue. Logan may also occasionally switch to the main server leaving Loki as the hot standby, which is fine as they will still have redundancy. Logan is the default standby, as Logan also runs the web server VMs so it has more load already.

To learn more about any of these things, click their respective links throughout this page.

Active Directory

Active Directory controls who gets all of our Group Policy/Security Policy and how they are applied. Basically, Active Directory controls how all of the computers in our domain behave, and is what allows us to have our unique logins that work on every computer. Without it, we are unable to login, we lose our shared folders, and we lose all our Security Policy.

Domain Name Services

Domain Name Services (or DNS) is what translates website names to IP addresses (like 24pin.tech to our public IP to Logan). Without it, accessing the internet and other computers on the network would require us to have all of the IPs memorized. That is bad. We like DNS. DNS is also needed for things to function properly since our network is in the middle of MUSD.local's things, so we need to forward properly through them.

DHCP

DHCP is run on Loki as the main server, and Logan is the hot standby. Our DHCP setup is fairly basic, but we do have special settings configured for FOG and for our servers and printers we have DHCP reservations.

Group Policy

Group Policy is where all of the settings and changes that we want to make to all of the computers in our network are made. Pretty much every Windows setting you have ever heard of, and many you haven't heard of, can be changed here and applied to some or all of the computers or servers in our network. We have different Group Policy settings set for our normal computers than the servers, and different ones are applied to computers that may run through our Active Directory but are in different rooms. Our Security Policy is part of Group Policy but has it's own page, as it is very important to keep things controlled and needed more of an explanation than other parts of Group Policy.