Catch Up

Well as may already know I am working at McDonald's Corporation in Oak Brook, IL. The main reason I was brought here was to implement this active directory that they designed. So, first few months here I was busy at intergrating myself into their environment. I believe I that down now. Last month, I built 4 Domain Controllers in our retail hosting environment provided by our outside vendor. They are 4 VMware virtual machines that will be simulating production environment. 2 server as a empty forest root and the other 2 are a child domain that will host all the restaurant objects.

The AD install went pretty smooth. The only difficult part was setting up DNS. Yes, I know that DNS is pretty easy to install if there was only one DNS server. But, I still yet have fully set it up as how they want it. We have all 4 servers running as DNS which is active directory intergrated. We have the root servers delagating the child domain zone to the two child domain servers. What still needs to be done? One, is forwarding all other request to our 3rd party hosting internet facign DNS servers. Second, is tying the old DNS zone back to our DNS servers so other devices are not left out.

So why are we building this out? Well, McDonalds wants to manage the devices in the restaurant like the POS server and the POS machine. In order to do this the must first be on a high-speed internet connection. Second, they need to have a VPN link back to the home office. Third, the machines must be joined to the domain. And finally, the SCCM agent must be installed. FYI- SCCM is Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager otherwise known as SMS. So with AD we'll provide a means to manage security accounts for support people and admins. As always, companies must keep up on meeting complientcy request.

Last week, I was busy taking inventory of our lab environment. I used the microsoft tool called Microsoft Assessment and Planning Solution Accelerator. Get it here. It scans your network using WMI and allows you to enter multiply credentials for a mixed environment. It is geared towards moving to Vista but the hardware inventory that is provides is priceless.

So this week, I'll be working on the RDM project which means setting up AD for the RDM servers and starting the installation of the custom software. The install will be pretty painful.

more to come.....