Blogcast Series: Infrastructure essentials

I've been busy over the past few days recording a series of blogcasts about setting up the essentials for a typical well-managed infrastructure. The network so far consists of six machines as shown in the diagram below.

The intention of these blogcasts are to walk through a number of steps to change a base installation of Active Directory, ISA Server and Exchange Server into what you would typically find in a small or medium sized enterprise. Of course, you'd find a similar infrastructure in larger enterprises too, so if you're an IT Professional in really any type of organisation, there should be something useful for you.

In the pipeline are:

- Allowing clients to browse the internet from the corporate network
- Configuring the ISA firewall client for automatic detection
- Setting up an Exchange mailbox for a user
- Setting up an Outlook profile to use the Exchange mailbox
- Publishing Outlook Web Access on the Internet (HTTP for now)
- Installing a Certificiate Authority
- Using the Certificate Authority to change OWA to use SSL Encryption
- Setting up a PPTP VPN
- Setting up an L2TP VPN
- Implementing quarantine
- Implementing some group policy
- Setting up mail exchange records to send and receive mail externally
....

It's probably no coincidence either that the configuration and ideas I have in mind also broadly match the types of configuration I've been using on my home network as a proving ground and test-bed production network. I find running a production network far more effective that using pre-canned demo's as the types of problem you see are real and can't be left to hang around untreated.

So, that's the plan so far - please pop a comment up if you want to see something specific in the series.

The first blogcast will be posted up tomorrow - keep an eye out :-)

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