Server simulations

reppgoa

Hi all,

I am just now getting my lab setup with 2008r2 and was wondering if there was any way to run simulations. I want something to break my server or to generate real world problems so that I have to fix them. Does anything like this exist? I mean, I can move people into AD all day, but I need to know how to troubleshoot. I need something to break so that I can fix it =D Thanks in advance for any help that you guys can provide.

Essendon

I think Microsoft have done a good job with the 2008 OS, there arent many things that just break on their own. But here are a few things you can do:

1. Create 2 DC's in same forest. Put them in the same site first and play with replication. Create a second site, chuck one of the DC's in the other site and play with intersite and intrasite replication.
2. Create DNS records on one server and watch how replication will automagically make it appear on the other server. You can run Network Monitor to see what really goes on behind the scenes. I recommend this tool, run it and it'll help hammer in the concepts.
3. In 2008 R2 there's something called AD Recycle Bin, enable this feature and see how you can recover deleted objects.
4. Learn about sysvol.
5. Play with NTFS file permissions, come up with scenarios of your own. Grant access here, deny there just at random. Put users in a group and give that group the rights to a folder but deny one of the group's members the deny permission to the folder. See how they are denied the permission to access the folder.
6. Play with Group Policy. Again, there are lots of scenarios you can come up with. Give people rights via security filtering, take the rights away. Apply GPO's to a particular OU and take users in and out of the OU. Change the security filtering to see how the policies are applied differently.
7. A good admin must be good at DFS and clustering. Run through the MS press books to get yourself started on these topics.

Hopefully this should get you started, I'm sure other folks can come up with more/better ideas!