I am in my first year of IT and suddenly find myself basically the IT Admin. There are many changes that need to be made and I need to practice in a test environment first.
I want to setup a test environment that is practiaclly identical to the production PDC (running Server 2003 Standard). A few things that concern me are:
1. What do you think is the best way to segment the test environment from the production LAN to prevent services from interfering with one another (i.e. DHCP)? Managed switch setup to allow HTTP traffic only?
2. How do I get my test machine to be setup identical to the production server? Promote to domain controller and use the AD backup from the production server? Some other kind of backup installation?
I suppose this would be the same scenario I would be facing if my physical machine suddenly imploded and there were no secondary controllers and I had to back everything up onto a whole new machine. This is essentially what I want to do.
Any suggestions or links or help of any kind will be MUCH appreciated. I try to log in here at elast once a week and look for a question I can answer or ways to contribute as a way of giving back when Ihave questions. Looking for a littel Karma here. 🙂
