Router Config

In order to work on the network, each device must find it's own numeric address, and the numeric address of any computer it wants to talk to. To work on the domain, it must know find the numeric address of local computers; the domain controller handles this. To work on the internet it must find the Ip of internet computers. With windows small network servers DHCP (handing each workstation it's own address) and DNS are often done only by the domain controller. This is simple, but if the server goes down all of the computers go down... If we let the router do DHCP, and point the first DNS to the server and the second DNS to the ISPs server or public DNS then local networking goes through the server, and if the server has a problem the workstations can still surf the web and/or remote in to the server.


You'll want to change a few settings to make your network clients use the Samba server for DNS -  without breaking DNS on the server.... Here my Samba Domain Controller will be on 192.168.1.2, and I have set it as the primary DNS and WINS servers. Also note that I am using google DNS just because it is much faster than my ISP.

Under services management I have set a static reservation for the DC. This means if you re-install the OS you don't have to manually reset it to static IP nor configure the secondary DNS. Note that when you enter the MAC address it must have any letters capitalized, and have the colons. If you replace the server motherboard you will need to update this.

On services tab, domain controller gets a reserved DHCP entry

Here's a few more changes to note, all of them somewhat self-explanatory.

 

 

Router gets time from your local official time source

For testing purposes it's handy to enable wake on LAN on your test network machines.

You'll want to port forward ssh to your domain controller if you administer it from outside the LAN