REAL SOLUTIONS TO FAKE PROBLEMS
I’m lucky enough to be a student at Tech Jobs Academy, and we just finished working on our first group project!
We were given a scenario in which a fictional company is setting up a new office and is looking for an IT firm to set up it’s network infrastructure. We were broken up into groups of five and tasked with playing the part of an IT company that will plan and present a proposal to meet the company’s needs.
WHY?
The purpose of this project was to demonstrate our ability as students to install and configure Windows Server.
The project was broken into two parts, each one week long.
The first part was developing a project plan, which was intended to demonstrate our ability to plan and document an IT project with a dated deliverable.
The second part was actually building the infrastructure and implementing our plan, which was intended to challenge us to resolve issues in the deployment of Windows Server and to use PowerShell to perform common configuration tasks.
EXECUTION
The main part of the plan included configuring a network of 5 servers, all with Server 2012 R2 Core. My team and I used five virtual machines to simulate the office environment and auto installed Server Core by building an answer file.
The project called for an Active Directory design with an empty forest root domain and one child domain. (Read more about the benefits of this design here) In the child domain we installed two domain controllers for redundancy purposes.
We used PowerShell scripts, which it was my role to create, to do a majority of the configurations, such as installing a forest root domain, installing a child domain, installing domain controllers, and adding users and groups to Active Directory.
TAKEAWAYS
My favorite part of the project was collaborating with my group members. We worked well as a team and got to know each other better in the process.
The most difficult part was setting up an isolated network for all 5 servers. I am admittedly weak when it comes to networking, so while setting up and troubleshooting this network, I gained a lot of knowledge and became more comfortable with networking.
Looking back on the project, I would have given more thought to part one and the planning process. I was eager to start building the infrastructure, and neglected some of the planning, which would have made the second part a little easier.
We ran into many issues along the way but when we finally got everything to work I felt a great sense of accomplishment! Overall I learned a great deal while doing this project and I look forward to the next one!
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