Over the weekend had a job for a local business setting up a small network . It's a school, so their environment was pretty simple. One DC (Server 2008 R2) acting file-server, ~20 or so desktops (Windows XP Pro), ~5 laptops, 7 or so network printers: 5 identical HP LaserJet Pro printers.
Setup one of the desktops with whatever software was needed. If any future software is required I know I can push via GPO. Imaged this machine after it was prepared using Acronis and deployed that image to the rest of the desktops in these classrooms.
What's the best (real world) practice with imaging machines? In my case all the hardware was the same, so I didn't run sysprep. Should I have, or is the SID change that Acronis (or insert image product here) can perform enough?
In some instances, checked the option to generate a new SID, in some I did not. In the cases I did not, is there a simple functional check to see what machines match or not? I assume I can just run NewSID on them and fix any issues.
Regarding the SID, what exactly does this the effect? Does it make a big difference when it comes to Group Policy, Machine Management, etc?
Named all the machines sequentially leaving room for a few additional machines like so: business-pc-01, business-pc-02, so on and so forth. I did this manually after imaging. The only way I can think of simplifying this process was to rename the machines from AD, or write a script before hand and run them on the machines.
On the server side, I setup AD and DNS. What's the proper way on setting up DNS/what should you pick at a bare minimum? I pulled the root hints from Google's DNS servers, and things seemed to work pretty swimmingly after that, but I feel like there is something I'm forgetting, or should've done differently. I've never been comfortable with DNS records personally.
I think the next step now the next time I am on site or working there remotely is to see if my Group Policy took into effect. I ran gpresult on one of the workstations and it was pulling the policy, I guess it was just taking a while for all the settings to go into effect in that first 90 minutes; even after a gpupdate /force.
The network is basically flat: 192.168.1.3-4 for the server IP addresses, .1.5-9 for the printers, .1.10-15 for access points, and the rest of the workstations just grab IP addresses from the router/DHCP. In a flat network like this, is it fine to have the router handle IP addresses, or should everything be done on the server?
In the future, how do I automate a lot more of this stuff? I'm still disappointed that I used Acronis: I had problems imaging from the network and had to put the image on a temporary workstation with XP to access the image file. Not sure why that was :[
Sorry about the long post. Just looking for as much advice as possible so I can learn from mistakes or possible pitfalls in my process and help anyone else who comes across this thread.
Thanks in advance if you've read this far :0
TL;DR - Looking for advice on improving creating networks, AD, GPO, Machine Names, Imaging. Any help is suggested and appreciated. I feel like I'm not as quick or as professional as I could be with all the knowledge in my head.
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