Lab project 1 - Day 3/5



  • Quick brief of the situation: Our class of 15 is split into two groups, Team A and Team B, I'm project leader of team B which has seven people. Now during the initial planning phase I ended up accepting team leader position with ten physical boxes. We had a bizzare "plan" which we asked to work around it's fecked up expectations (it expected more boxes than we had, and overloaded one box with 5 VMs), however our objectives weren't so bad, we have 10 services to setup each on it's own physical or virtual machine (which we asked if we could merge some machines, like dc/dns/dhcp). We also need to have one forest setup with two domains that are not children of the other and four sites, two per domain. Four physically separated sites would be created, when planning we decided for four boxes per site and how we were going to get those boxes. All in all that and the actually planning led to these wtfs/problems.

    • Team leader better at Linux than Windows, made descisions based on strength of Linux (and other personally strengths)
      • Like it doesn't feck its NAT when adding a VPN connection and static route info about said VPN
        • ... and the routing table is small and tends to stay that way
      • Windows XP requires a CD key to install, Server 2003 doesn't, 30ish CD-keys and 6 hours later I got XP installed
      • Apparently I am the only member who can plan ones own site (basically I did all the planning and no-one else is willing to make their own descisions)
    • Subnets were set at 16 bits, need to be at 24, when discovered adjustisting the bitmasks were a a pain because we were RDPing at the time
    • We were given cisco routers to use, which none of us are trainned for, team leader left guessing (CLI isn't that hard)
    • Apparently a VPN/NAT box doesn't like using a demmand-dial connection one way and setting up another one the other way
      • It only works one way, the second connection (for duplex style communication) will never set itself up
      • It messes up the NAT functionality of the box
    • We need to setup IAS, we were given all of a ten minute demo to study IAS
    • We also need to setup DFS, which was never covered
    • I assigned each site one admin, the other three were respoinsible for building the VMs and distributing them
      • Apparently a VM and the host can share a nic (and have different IPs) in VPC, I'm used to VirtualBox which can't do that
    • Waiting for hardware like switches (arrived late yesterday) is a pain when you have a short deadline
    • Drivers are not fun to install, especially when upacking the driver causes a machine to BSoD
      • ... and BSoD when trying to copy an already unpacked driver from another machine
    • 4 members of the team like to take 10 minute smoke breaks every 40 minutes
      • ... and coffee breaks every 30 minutes
    • None of out labs come close to this scale of project, last project we did was half the time and three/four man teams
      • It also had clearer instructions and a checklist
      • The instructor was also available and not marking test that were due for marking 2 weeks ago
    • Out domains are named qgtc1.local and qgtc2.local, with a dyslexic and a near-legally blind team-member setting up the domains was quite an adventure.

    Thankfully we're marked on what we learnt, unfortunately we won't be paid the same way. If anyone wants to explain wtf is up with that VPN I will be very grateful. I will also answer any questions because I've obviously left some information out.



  • Um, you seem to have spilt the contents of your brain into a post... 



  • Probably, I needed to rant.



  • @Lingerance said:

    Thankfully we're marked on what we learnt, unfortunately we won't be paid the same way. If anyone wants to explain wtf is up with that VPN I will be very grateful. I will also answer any questions because I've obviously left some information out.

    ... Like what the hell is going on. Please, no core dumps of your brain! What class is this? What's going on here? Where are you setting these up? Why do we care?



  • @Volmarias said:

    What class is this? What's going on here? Where are you setting these up? Why do we care?
     

    I'm assuming that, since the amount of boxes greatly exceeds the number team members, we're not dealing with programming or authoring tasks, but with a project especially geared towards How Fucked-up Complex Can You Make Your Network; something like webstandard's ACID2 test; a similar mishmash of not-quite-practical testing setups for networking. I'd question the value of the experience, but eh, school. I'm sure the students learn something from it. :)



  • Sorry this is a network security course that deals with windows server 2003 at every possible opportunity. Anyway my planning is the foundation for the WTFs, we're starting to actually have most of our systems online now, so sun is now shining.



  • @Lingerance said:

    this is a network security course that deals with windows server 2003

    I think I found your problem...  ;)

    To the haters: it's a joke!  Seriously, some of my best friends are Windows Server 2003 boxes.



  • @GalacticCowboy said:

    @Lingerance said:

    this is a network security course that deals with windows server 2003

    I think I found your problem...  ;)

    Could be worse. At least it isn't a mix of WinME and MacOS 9 boxes.



  • @Carnildo said:

    @GalacticCowboy said:

    @Lingerance said:

    this is a network security course that deals with windows server 2003

    I think I found your problem...  ;)

    Could be worse. At least it isn't a mix of WinME and MacOS 9 boxes.

    Accessing VMS servers. 


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