Joining a MacBook Pro to Windows Server 2016 Domain Controller

Now that my blog is setup and my planning is complete, I decided to get started building my small Active Directory network.

The first thing I did was build out a really small network with just two computers. I wanted to build out a Windows Server 2016 domain controller on an Intel NUC 5i5RYB and then bind a MacBook Pro 13 laptop client running Catalina to it. These are the items I had to work with for now.

To do this, I first did some research and ended up referring to the these pages on the Internet. I didn’t exactly follow those pages but I did get some interesting things to work on from each page.

• How to join a Mac in Microsoft Active Directory?
• How to enable Integrated Authentication on macOS and Linux using Kerberos
• Configure domain access in Directory Utility on Mac

However, after going through those pages I still could not get the Mac to join the domain using the GUI. It was pretty frustrating because I was hoping for it to “just work”.

However, this story has a happy ending. I finally got it join very easily using a command on the terminal.

This is an example of the command:

dsconfigad -preferred adserver.example.com -a <computername> –domain example.com -u administrator -p <password>

And this is the actual command I ran for my specific network:

dsconfigad -preferred server.techsnazzy.local  -a seanmbp13 -domain techsnazzy.local -u administrator -p <password>

When I was done, I had the green light of success. Joy! 🎉

So the lesson I learned here is to just run the command rather than deal with the GUI. I’ll have to dive in deeper to find out why the GUI doesn’t work. Also, before I had success with the terminal, I did some other things.

• On the MacBook Pro I disabled wireless and configured a manual IP address on the wired network port.
• I also manually added the DNS addresses of 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4. There are others but I like using these Google addresses.
• And just for good measure, I manually entered the WINS server address into the network settings.
• I also attempted to configure it through the Directory Utility GUI but had little success.
• Finally, as I noted earlier, configuring with the CLI above worked best.

Next up, I will configure a group of three Windows servers using VirtualBox on my MacBook Pro 16.