Active Directory Adventures
In my Portable Homelab project I talked about setting up the hardware side of things.
I decided that it was too much to talk about in one project so i split them up. If you want to know the hardware go to this page.
So what is my goal for this project. I want to learn active directory. I asked my teachers and got some guidance along with information from my book which has vm guidelines for the labs.
Whith that i started the first version of my ADLab.
The inital setup
| Name | OS | IP | Purpose |
|---|---|---|---|
| PFSense | PFSense | 10.0.0.1 | This is just to route traffic between networks |
| DC01 | Windows Server 2025 | 10.0.0.10 | This is the main pc that i will probalby use, Its the root domain controller |
| CLIENT01 | Windows 11 Pro | 10.0.0.11 | This will be the first client on the network |
The first thing i configured was the PFSense firewall. I set it up so that it would take the wifi and translate it to an private hyperv switch.
I created the internal network with the IP range 10.0.0.1/24 and connected the v-switches. I aquired a windows server eval and a windows 11 iso and created the other two vms.
As stated in the table each device was named and given an ip. Since pfsense was used the dns requests were handled by it, but i decided id figure that out when i got AD DS installed.
Now it was time for Active Directory. I loaded up DC01 and installed AD DS and promoted it to domain controler. I setup the domain adlab.test and enabled dns.
With that done i setup the CLIENT01 and connected it to the domain. I was able to ping DC01 from CLIENT01 at this point, but thats mostly because of pfsense. PFSense still handling most of the networking.
TO fix this, I installed DHCP service on DC01 set the scope under adlab.test and configured pfsense to redirect DHCP and DNS requests to DC01.
I was now able to connect CLIENT01 with dhcp without assigning the ip manually.
TO BE CONTINUED
WOrking on this page as of 9/31/2026
Im putting this here as a marker, im not finished with this project im working on it in real time. I will update the site when i get new things to talk about