Hi all,
I'm stuck on a problem and I can't really find a good answer on technet or watching simple YouTube videos (if there are any technet instructional videos for my questions I'd appreciate a link... when I can get to a good fast connection with lots of data
allowance I'll go there and download)...
I've spun up an Azure VM and selected something reasonable for my purposes, which is Windows Server 2012 R2.
I've promoted it to domain controller and I'm not really sure what I'm doing here. So I'll move on to the DNS for the moment, unless I need AD DS configured properly first. I have only one admin account and not creating any others for the moment, and use
RDP to login and muck around. It doesn't matter that much right now, since this is just a test/learn environment where I can make a few mistakes, but I hope not big ones :)
First with AD DS, I just set the name of the server in the VM to myapp.local, when making it a new domain forest. I had no idea why or whether I should have set up a new forest.
I've read that Azure VMs usually have DNS managed themselves, and have Virtual IP addresses which may change. It seems like my VM instance VIP has changed.
Now that I want to move on to DNS, this is where it's getting interesting. How can I verify my VIP changes or make sure it sticks? Or do I need to get a static IP for it? I think I can use some kind of publish wizard to make the virtual IP stick
and stay permanent, like a static IP, but not sure if that's what I want.
I have a domain name I want to use, like myapp.com. And I want to use my domain registrar's control panel to have that resolve to the IP (or redirect silently) to myapp.cloudapp.net. I'm given a list of nameservers the registrar has, and I'm kind of
stuck. What IPs to put in? So I'm thinking I'll make a stub zone, which I think makes sure that I'm using nameservers elsewhere, and that stuff gets copied into the stub zone and updates when it needs to.
So far it looks like I'll have just a NS RR, which will be ns1.myregistrar.net, or something like that.
What I'm really having trouble with is:
- What is the IP of this new DNS server? Just any local IP from ipconfig, e.g. 10.0.0.1? Or 127.0.0.1?
- After entering the network mask, what should I use for default gateway? Same or different address?
- If the virtual IP changes, how to make it stick, or how to make it return the updated/current virtual IP everytime there's a query for the name?
- With the registrar, would I enter the current virtual IP as the domain's primary and secondary nameserver after configuring DNS on the Azure hosted server? Would I need to find an option that supports dynamic IPs?
- Or with the registrar, once I get the DNS up on the Azure server, would dns1.whatever and dns2.whatever work, unless it somehow requires IP addresses?
I hope this question makes sense... essentially, is my virtual IP going to stay the same somehow (it seems to change), how to configure the host in AD DS and whether it should be a new forest, how to configure the DNS and what zones should I add and configure,
and what should I do at my registrar end to make myapp.cloudapp.net the same thing as myapp.com?
After that I need to configure IIS, but I'll leave that for now until I get my head around ADDS and DNS.
Thanks very much for any pointers/tips or advice.