School project setting up multiple servers.

Feb 25, 2018
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First off, I am very sorry for the giant wall of text. Thank you for clicking the post and if there is anything you can help with I would really appreciate it. Grab your water, coffee, tea, soda, etc, and thank you for reading.

I am in the computer maintenance course at my college and our capstone class is troubleshooting. Our school has it set up as a real life job scenario and wants it to be mostly about critical thinking and how we handle situations and how we research anything we come across. Our instructor has already told us that he does not expect us to do everything by any means, but wants to see how we handle things that happen and handle working with other classmates. The issue is that a good amount of the networking stuff we haven't covered and what little we have covered (6/60 credit hours) was all done through VMWare Workstation, not through multiple PC's, thick/thin/zero clients, multiple servers, different types of roles, etc. Even going to the networking instructors they have said it's 2nd and 3rd year courses and things we will have no experience with in my degree plan as well as we wouldn't be hired to do most of the time. However, with all that being said, I actually would like to learn how do a lot of this stuff, and would like to be able to pass this class and if it does come up in the field, I would also like to be able to do it.

As I mentioned this class is supposed to be like a real job. Our instructor is the CEO and will only help with bare minimum things to keep it as realistic as possible. We students are the employees, with one student as the project manager. None of us really feel comfortable as a PM, or even how to be one, but one guy (Z), volunteered. 4 out of 12 weeks in course, we haven't made much progress, because none of us really know what to do, or understand even where to start. Add most of the class missing a lot due to work, personal life, etc, and it's looking worse.

For the server part, it will be done using Windows Server 2012 R2. Roles required will be ADDS, DNS, DHCP (which I have all done before, but again, in VMWare and with only 1 server), along with NAT, PXE, FOG, WSUS (which I have never done before). We will have 3-6 different servers with different roles attached to each. After researching the various roles I have started to get the understanding of what each one does, but the issue I am running into is I honestly don't know how to set them up, installing the roles isn't an issue, it's setting them up and setting the network adapters up the correct way. All of the information I keep finding is for A) a single server, B) everything done virtually, or C) different server OSs, none of which fit into our more specified set up.

https://imgur.com/QewiKxn

What we have gotten to is that there will be more than 1 PC with the server installed and that different servers will have different roles. The main server will have ADDS, DNS, and DHCP and will be named MAINSRV. It has 3 NIC cards, with only 1 being in use. The NAT server will only have access to the NAT function using the Remote Access role and will be named NATSRV. It has 3 NIC cards and will be using 2. The final server will have access to FOG, PXE, and WSUS and will be named OTHERSRV. It will also have 3 NIC cards and only use 1. For the MAINSRV and OTHERSRV we will be using the private switch while the NATSRV will have 1 connection to the private switch to provide access to the Internet and another connection to the school's public switch to actually access the Internet.

NATSRV NIC Public:
IP: 206.51.61.194 (not sure if it needs to be static or dynamic)
SM: 255.255.255.0
DG: 206.51.61.1
DNS: 206.51.51.174, 206.51.48.11

Setting these up is mainly the issue and where I am needing the most help.
NATSRV NIC Private:
IP: by default I get 169.524.203.249 (Static), except I have been that it's wrong, just not why or how to set it up.
SM: 255.255.0.0
DG: ??? Guides online say none. If I put one in, I get a warning about multiple default gateways can cause connectivity problems.
DNS: ??? Unsure as well.

MAINSRV NIC Private:
IP: 169.254.203.250 (Static)
SM: 255.255.0.0
DG: 169.254.203.249 From what I understood online, I was using the NATSRV NIC private IP address to point to.
DNS: ???

OTHERSRV NIC Private:
IP: 169.254.203.251 (Static)
SM: 255.255.0.0
DG: 169.254.203.249 Same as above.
DNS: ???

Domain:
We tried setting up the domain on MAINSRV, but we still cannot connect other servers/clients to our MAINSRV. The domain is CPMT2345.harlingen.tstc.edu. We have a Forward and Reverse lookup with A and PTR respectively, but we are unsure if we even set it up correctly. The error says unable to join domain. NSLOOKUP doesn't find our domain at all.

Now, the other issues:
Rather than turning off the Firewall, I found out that I am supposed to add a rule to inbound traffic to allow pings through so I added the rule. I wanted to make sure I can ping the servers to make sure that they are talking.

As I said in the beginning, we aren't sure really where to start. For the 3 servers, which roles to start with mainly. We tried starting with WSUS, but found out that we needed to set up the NAT function first. We spent about a week trying to get it set up, but other students who have taken the class said to start with DNS and ADDS, then DHCP, then NAT, then the rest, but also there are others that say it doesn't matter. So I need to know if I start with those or what other order we should start with? Also, we tried setting up the DNS role, but ran into massive issues setting up the domain name and connecting any system to our server. Any help we can get on that would be much appreciated.

If there are any sites or books anyone can recommend, I will be in your debt. Also, thank you very much for any and all help.
 
Feb 25, 2018
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Thank you but unfortunately I don't live near a micro center but I will look online for the book you mentioned.