My company is moving away from in house administration, and moving toward hosted services and collocation. Our current equipment is dated, so we’ve purchased a new Dell 2950 with Windows Server 2003 Standard R2.
Our goal is to make this a secure file server with full Remote Access for clients, as well as hosting websites and FTP. Our company is small, 15 people, so this shouldn’t be a heavy work load for one machine.
My main issues are with RRAS and VPN access. I’ve configured the server as a domain controller, DNS server, DHCP server, and configured RRAS. But when I login from a remote machine, I cannot browse the distributed file system, and cannot map drives.
Most of the support I find for configuring a new 2003 server uses a forest scenario where other servers are offering DHCP and DNS information. In my case, I want all this decided from one machine, and I’m not sure what special considerations to take.
Should I be ignoring Active Directory, and just using local security policies? We will eventually be taking our server in house again, and I’ll hopefully get some redundant DC’s in time, but for now, I need this server to be our workhorse.
