How to Setup a Basic Home Lab Running Active Directory (Oracle VirtualBox) | Add Users w/PowerShell 

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Keep your mistakes in your videos like you did here. That's a lesson within a lesson when you fix something and show how you did it. Awesome video. 👌

For anyone trying to retain the info while saving time: install the server and configure it with the guest additions. Shut it down and immediately clone it. Follow the video, and then delete the original VM fully. Before you do it again, clone the VM again. Follow the video but do it slowly, with a word doc open, and type out, step by step everything that happens. Write your own instructions, based on the video. Get it right and working - delete that VM. use the raw clone again. Now do the whole thing with out the video, just following your notes. etc. Always have the clone ready to go and do it from scratch a few times.

I really loved the way you explained the whole concept in a simple and concise manner. I am coming back to learn from you.

Thanks for the video! I hope to get into IT one day and have been building out my homelab, both physically and virtually, and this is a great start to getting AD set up for my VMs!

Thank you so much, Josh! I followed along and everything went smoothly. This was my first time setting up a home lab for practicing Active Directory and I can not thank you enough for providing such clear instructions. Great job!

Thanks for another amazing tutorial, man! Here's the only differences I found when running this on my own computer (August 2022). 1) Different Windows ISO (3:44) - I was redirected to a Windows 10 Enterprise ISO instead of the standard version used in this video. 2) Slightly different Windows 10 installation (49:07) - Windows 10 Enterprise kicked me straight to the "log in with a Microsoft account" screen. I never saw the "Let's connect to a network" screen as demonstrated in the tutorial, but it's an easy fix. Just click on the "Join via Domain" (or something like that, can't remember the exact wording) and then you get around both 1) the Windows sign-on and 2) telling Windows that "I don't have internet" at startup.

This was awesome. Sat through it to the end. I already know I will be visiting this again once I get myself a faster device. Once again, Love it!!

Hi Josh, thank you so much for the very detail walk through. I am reentering the Windows / AD environment and this is right on point for a very excellent refresher. Thank you and keep up the good work. I will continue to follow you.

I would LOVE more home lab tutorials and showing more of the functionalities of e.g. WSUS, admin center, GPOs, powershell. I looked through multiple tutorials and yours was the absolute best.

Great tutorial. I really like the fact you go through each line of code in PowerShell to explain what is happening. Helps me break it down to smaller chunks and remember what each part is doing.

Thanks for making this Josh! Got everything setup and took snapshots before I go breaking everything trying to learn what it all does lol. Glad to have someone as thorough as you making content like this!

Great tutorial. Helped me overcome my lack of knowledge in how to set up a DC with all the features needed by AD DS. I do believe this will better prepare me for my new endeavor starting next week. Thanks, Josh! YOU'RE AWESOME!

Amazing work Josh! Thank you for your videos, they are very clear, easy and entertaining to follow. Ive worked on your Azure Sentinel video and now this one to prepare some experience for my CV.

🙇‍♂ - Patreon + Discord - 🙇‍♂ www.patreon.com/joshmadakor - Any support greatly appreciated!!

Congrats Josh !! Love your videos, great content and great explanation of everything. Going to keep supporting by watching your tutorials

Went through it for the second time and got everything figured out! Great video and lab to follow along with. I appreciate your work.

This is by far the most thorough and easy to follow AD/HomeLab setup that I have come across. Other videos miss steps or something is out of date, but this video is top tier. Thank you for all of your content! I look forward to watching and learning from your videos in the future.

This HomeLab is absolutely FANTASTIC !!! I love when there are some unexpected issues and are resolved this is a Plus for troubleshooting 2x1. Thank you so much to explaining power shell script for creating NT account. You are the Men!!!

I love you kept the troubleshooting in the video. That's awesome, man. Subbed, commented, and liked. Running this whole setup now.

Thanks Josh!!! What an awesome time..took me half a day-but tons of fun!!! Learning at something so cool, is a blast. Would love to do this kind of stuff as a job!! Take care and Happy New Year!!

This is probably my most favorite home lab tutorial that I have watched so far! Hope to see more videos like this from you one day! Thanks!

Fantastic tutorial. I just followed along and everything's working great. For whatever reason I always run into issues setting up the networking but with this everything was a breeze and just worked. Well spoken and great job. Thank you for sharing.

Hi Josh, I found this video, worked my way through it, and got everything up and running. This was awesome!!!!

Thank you so much for this video! I tried other videos to help with setting up Active Directory in a Home lab and yours was the best one! Trying to learn these skills through self study is possible with people like you. It is very much appreciated!

The feeling of something not turning out correctly the first time leading to have to trouble shoot the issue , solving it, is a great feeling. Brings confidence knowing that when i make an oops or that there is an oops in the real world I can solve it right away. Thank you.

Thank you for the tutorial, this was a fun weekend project!

Great video, was able to follow every single step from start to finish and learned a lot about active directory and networking practically. Thank you for this video!

This was absolutely amazing. It took me a little longer than I expected to play around with it but I learned so much in doing so. Your breakdown of the PowerShell portion was also so extremely helpful in understanding. Truly so grateful I stumbled across your channel. I can't wait to try more!

I did some studies on AD DS and Windows server some time ago and struggled a bit. But this video has really helped put all the pieces together for me and I definitely have a better understanding of it. Thanks very much for going to the trouble of making it. Liked and subscribed :)

Hi Josh, It was a great learning experience. I am currently looking for help desk positions and had to learn AD and get practice going. I loved it thanks for all the detailed info. because of you i now have a working AD to play with and configure further.

I just completed this. By far the best guide i have seen! Thank you!

Just finished this lab. Like a few other comments it took me a bit longer than I thought (mainly because I only gave my server 12GB HDD and it wouldn't install ADDS so I had to start over), but this is very useful information. Really helps to understand how AD works. Most AD environments are already set up and configured. Understanding the nuts and bolts of HOW an AD environment is set up is going to be very useful when I interview.

Josh, excellent tutorial. I LOVE the fact that you didn't edit out your mistakes- you showed the process of backtracking and resolving the issue. Again- well done. Thank you for doing all this.

Just went through this. Very nice! I appreciate the PS explanation. I really enjoyed the tutorial. I'm going to run through this several times. Thanks man.

By far the best instructional video I have watched regarding the set up of Active Directory and DHCP!! Thank you so much!!

Great video! I'm currently in a help desk role and this has been very helpful in better understanding the environment and setting up my own home lab to work towards a sysadmin position. Thank you!

Thanks Josh, landed my first help desk role and now I gotta get used to working in AD!

I enjoyed this turorial! I'm glad I created my first AD Homelab :) Thank you for this!

Thank you so much brother ! The overview in the beginning of this video is so important before diving in !!!

Hi Josh, I just wanted to say thanks for all you do. As a former teacher and career-changer, I find myself coming back to you for inspiration and functional advice. I'm working on creating a portfolio, and I just finished doing a write-up with screenshots replicating what you demonstrated here. I was helpful to write it out, because it forced me to slow down my thinking in order to explain what I was doing. I'm pretty sure what I wrote is mostly correct. At least now I can say that I now how to setup Server for Active Directory, etc., and show some evidence of it. Thanks again.

Thank you for that look into your powershell script. I'm a beginner level python scripter and I've been meaning to get into powershell automation, looking over a working script like this is a great way to learn things.

This was truly fun to learn. I appreciate your time and effort in creating this type of content. Keep up the great work!

Amazing video, I tried following similar videos from other creators but yours was by far the most detailed and complete. Thanks for the hard work!

This is a great video, thanks for the content. You mention doing a video on ip addressing, that would be awesome. Also I am currently taking a class on windows powershell, please consider doing some videos on scripting and automation. Thanks.

Just finished the Active Directory course in htb and this is a great opportunity to practice what I learned. Thank u 🙏

thanks josh for this i had to use it to create a lab myself following your instructions although i got into some hitches but eventually figured it out, this was so helpful thanks again, am going for more of your cybersecurity projects that would look good on my resume.

Josh, I have followed your videos for a while, I am currently working on this to get my first cyber job while teaching myself to take the comptia security+ I felt like this was just as important to do while studying for the exam and trying to get a job. Thanks again

A tip for anyone watching that is having trouble with setting up the VirtualBox DC and its not giving you the proper options like in this video: Please make sure VT-x is enabled in your system's BIOS. If it isnt, you will get really weird errors since your not letting your computer use the hardware to run the virtual machine properly. For example it was reading my computer as a 32bit machine when it wasnt and having kernal errors. If you are unaware of how to do this, just turn off your computer, and when you press the power button to turn it back on just keep pressing F10 on your keyboard to bring up your system's BIOS. Under one of the security or configuration settings, it should give you an option to enable VTx, Virtualization Technology, or whatever variation your BIOS might refer to it as. Its all the same thing. My HP pc came with it disabled by default, so I thought this would be good information for the less advanced users.

Thanks. One of the most well made tutorials I've come across. Great in depth knowlegde

Just completed this hands on Lab. Simplete to follow along but takes time 😄 Thank you so much for your dedication in providing this high quality content. Appreciate your work Josh

Awesome, that was extremely helpful. Thanks for taking the time to explain that script as well!

Thanks for the lab, very informative. Just got my A+ and Net+, gonna put this on my resume and hopefully get Sec+ soon

Hi Josh, Have you thought of continuing this lab? Maybe make a video on a specific office-like scenario? Really enjoyed this one. Looking forward to more. Cheers.

Thank you for breaking down down Active Directory like this Josh! The entire tutorial was simple and easy to follow!

Thanks a lot Josh. This is by far the best hands-on tutorial.

Thanks a lot for this amazing lab. I used Vmware so the setting were a little annoying to follow but I completed my mini lab and will be adding this to my resume . I'll also be adding knowledge in powershell now since I can understand some scripts hahah..you rock!

Hi Josh...great step-by-step tutorial!! I was able to successfully set up this Active Directory home lab on my laptop. After earning my CompTIA A+ certification, I'm looking for my first IT job after having been in retail management for years. Thought I would put what I've learned in CompTIA A+ into practice with a focus on Active Directory in the meantime. This lab should definitely do the trick! Thank you, thank you! You mentioned in the video that the lab could be used for subsequent videos specific to Active Directory. If there are additional videos, do you have links to those videos? My apologies if you've already answered this question several times in the comments lol. Thank you again for this great tutorial!!

Awesome Video Josh! Haven't used AD for over 6 mos. Great refresher. Saving that script for future use.

Wow! it was mind-blowing, thank you for sharing such high-level corporate Network skills

First of all, the lab is awesome and the video is very well explained! Quick question: in my lab everything is working properly, but when i get the windows client , it doesnt connect to internet. It get its IP address from DHCP as expected, i can even ping Internal network interface and internet interface of Domain Controller from the Windows client , but it simply doesn't seem to get connected. Any clues what could be causing this? Thanks

Hey yall. if anyones page is looking different when you try to download windows 10 iso or its not just allowing you to do so. left click and choose inspect option. then switch to Mobile view/ ctrl + shift + M . Then refresh the page then you will be seeing what Josh saw. continue and download. if you feel like browser download speed is slow. when it asked either 64 bit or 32 bit change back to normal desktop view. right click on the 64/32 bit button choose "copy clean link" then open up either Free Download Manager or whatever Torrent you use and simple paste to download it at maximum speed. Adios

Excellent tutorial mate, please keep uploading server stuffs!

Thank you so much, Josh! I've been trying to setup a home lab for the past 3 months. Your video really helped!

Thanks!

For new people setting up lab, I would HIGHLY RECOMMEND setting network options to bridge. Otherwise, NAT normally has issues with private to private IP.

This was a cool lab. I just received my information technology support specialist certificate in December and I've been looking for ways to sharpen my skills. This was very helpful. Thank you sir.

Another absolute banger video Josh, thank you for the help!

Hey Josh, great video; I've spent most of the morning following along :). There is an issue with the github link. I think it was inadvently truncated as it's missing the "archive/master.zip" part . as you know, it's needed for the viewer to copy and paste and to follow along as described in the video.

I was going through the lab and I believe the Default Gateway you setup for DHCP scope is incorrect in the picture you uploaded for the network diagram. I was having issues connecting CLIENT1 machine to internet and when running IPCONFIG I was pulling gateway 172.168.0.1 Got it working when I edited routing in the DC SCOPE Just wanted to let Josh know as well as anyone who may be having this issue after pulling the numbers from the screenshot Also don't forget to restart the DHCP server after making this edit and then running IPCONFIG /renew on CLIENT1

I can only appreciate the amazing job you doing .. keep it up✌️

Seriously, you don’t know how helpfully was this video for me. Thanks for your content. Subscribed.

My computer can’t handle server 2019 period so I just have to watch along, nothing is working here.

Thanks for the great tutorial Josh. I loved that powershell script- the fact that you could set the colour to cyan made it that much more fun to execute, definitely going to start looking into powershell and seeing what else I can do with it. I'm stuck on one thing though, my client cant browse the web. My DC can browse the web and can ping my client at 172.16.0.100. My client can ping 8.8.8.8 and 172.16.0.1. ipconfig on the clients internal adapter shows everything is in order. I've reinstalled my DNS and RAS/NAT roles. I don't know what else I can do but I just can't get my client to browse web pages. Any quick ideas? Don't need super detail in the comments I'm just lost. Going to start all over again in the mean time to see if the problem reoccurs before coming back to attempt a fix.

This tutorial was GREAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAATTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT , I went from knowing nothing about Active Directory to having a decent understanding of it in this single tutorial. Keep up the good work!

Thank you Josh for the awesome explanation for creating a homelab for AD and users with the PowerShell .Also the Azure Sentinel-Honeypot Lab was great which helped me a lot while I was doing SC200 . Your contents are great !

Hey Josh! Amazing video - unfortunately, I can't pass adding the users :( Powershell gives me the error message 'Directory object not found'. I have played around with the scrpt (changing ou to cn on path), I have even redone my steps, so not sure what is wrong ...

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This was so easy to understand and follow. I'm trying to get my first job and a lot of employer wants A.D as a skillset or even required this video help me a lot. Thank you

Hey man, want to thank you for this awesome video, it helped me a lot to understand AD and setup my LAB. THANKS!

I checked the network adapter settings for the client and it was already set to obtain automatically. Went to CMD to ping 8.8.8.8 and request timed out with 100 % packet loss

Thank you for this video Josh. This was extremely helpful for me. Being able to create a company domain and get to fool around with it has been more helpful experience than working as a help desk tech....

I just finished watching this video and I must admit is a top notch video and your engagement with the audience is second to none. Thank you for your help in this regards.

This video was very helpful and insightful. Thank you for the various breakdowns and having the text quality sharp enough for us to read. I was able to follow along even through using a different VM software.

Just after the entire video itself, the “creting user” part was my favorite. The part where you chuckle, I felt that deeply. Great video! It was helpful and well made. Listened to once on the bus and once at home and I was able to set up the lab. Thanks!!

This worked perfectly for me, followed every step easily. Thank you for this video!

@JoshMadakor Followed tutorial step-by-step. Got everything to work using a 2015 13" MBP with 4GB RAM total. I have rectangle burn marks on my knees. … But in all honesty, this was a great follow along. Good, clear instructions. Useful ramble, appreciate seeing you make those little mistakes and hearing you work through it. Subscribed to the channel, and looking forward to more builds!

Thank you so much, this is brilliant. I have a sysadmin interview but havent done much server creation/management/AD account creation. You made a perfect video in great order, thank you once again!

great video, followed along and did this on my dell r710 homelab server. i always did a mediocre job keeping things on my main home network so its great to learn how to isolate this a bit to keep things walled off. great beginning to my homelab setup. now i must figure out what i wanna do next! thanks again! i sent this to friends who wanted to get into homelabbing as well.

Cool video Josh, it was fun to follow along

Thank you so much for this video. Never seen a video so well explained and easy to follow along. Definitely subscribing.

Thank you soo much! Going into an interview soon and really needed a crash-course on this

Great video, I was able to follow along using a windows pc and hyper-v. Thanks Josh

One of the best and educative IT HANDS-ON TUTORIALS I have watched this period. Thank you for this great job

Fantastic Video - thank you for putting in the time to share your knowledge

Awesome video Josh! Thanks a ton for taking the time to create tutorials like this. Just what I was looking for to help practice the basics and get my own Home Lab setup. A few things were different over the years, but nothing to complex to figure out. Going to run through it a few times to get it really down and then mess with some GPO settings 😁

Amazing stuff! I created in hyper-v. Learned so much! Thank you!

appreciate you this lab is going on my git-hub hopefully it helps in breaking into tech

Man, it took me two days to complete the entire lab. But, I really loved it. Thank you very much for doing this, I learned a lot. This makes more sense when you put all the pieces together. I would like to expand the PowerShell script to check for users that already exist. Thank you for all your videos. I am currently transitioning from Academia to cybersecurity and I find your videos very informative, they keep me inspired and always wanting to learn more.

Thanks bro for the video. Created my first home lab ever today!