Not an infrastructure person?

I’ll admit it. I’m not. Never have been. Reading about TCP/IP, subnets, etc, makes my eyes glaze over and I start to drool within minutes.

But, I needed to set up a virtual environment to try out some stuff that involves TFS and Windows domains, and I didn’t want to reuse any pre-existing virtual machines. I wanted to build them from the ground up.

What to do? What to do?

So I did a Bing search and found a few articles on creating a domain controller. One tutorial in particular, by Thomas Shinder, was especially helpful. He started from the ground up: none of the let’s-do-a-couple-of-steps-skip-a-bunch-of-steps-then-presto-we’re-done magic. He shows the steps from start to finish with screen shots and instructions: how to set up an environment. Great stuff! 

I deviated from Thomas’ instructions in one place by making the preferred DNS server IPv4 address the address of my domain controller itself instead of 127.0.0.1. (When I tried the localhost address for the DNS on the DC machine as he did, my client machine couldn’t find the DNS server. When I went back to the DC and reset the DNS server address to the DC’s IP address, my client machine could find the DC by name.)

So now I’m setting up TFS on the client machine as part of that domain. And I’ll soon be able to run my experiments.

Let the fun begin.