Home Network
At home I'm currently running a Active Directory based network. I'm running two Windows Server 2003 servers and 6 desktop computers, as well two laptops.
I decided to set Active Directory up last year when I had decided that I had got enough of not having a proper user management system which I could apply proper permissions / policies on. With AD, I can have one consistent network with every computer all having the same group policy settings and I found this a godsend rather than having to make changes to every machine when I needed to.
I have a fair few mates and people come round my house regularly so I thought rather than them all messing around with accounts with administrative privileges, why not set AD up and then I can manage users and their permissions. Also, every user has a redirected My Documents folder so all their data is accessible from any computer joined to my domain. It makes general management of my network a lot easier and more consistent.
I also set it up as a learning platform because I wanted to learn more about Active Directory and get more hands on experience setting it, and associated technologies like DNS, WINS and DHCP up as well as managing it. The size of my network is nothing compared to say the size of an Active Directory implementation in a typical secondary school, but I have learnt a lot from it being here.
I'm slowing upgrading both of my servers and getting my whole LAN up to gigabit (switches, NICs etc.) It's a work in progress which I'm doing here and there as and when I get spare cash! I'm now running a full gigabit network compromising of two Netgear GS605 5 port gigabit switches, with a SMC 24 port 10/100mb/s switch uplinked in my shed for the end of the 100mb/s backbone (still got a few computers and access point etc on gigabit).
Below is a network diagram at the moment. My first domain controller (domain master) is called "laughingsquid", and runs Active Directory, DNS, DHCP, WINS and also XAMPP (Apache, PHP, mySQL etc) for several web applications that I use. My other server is called "jinx". This is also a domain controller and also runs DNS and Windows Media streaming server for testing purposes. In the long term though, I want to stream media off it for display on my website. Both servers are global catalog servers.
I want to go into IT (mainly network management and administration) as a career (well it's one of my career options.) I'm extremely interested in the Windows Server system. My friends might call me sad sometimes but it's what I like and enjoy.
