I’ve recently been working on building and improving my Windows environment at home. Over the last few weekend I’ve:

1. Created an application server accessible via RDP and IIS. Improvements still to come: Setting up the Apache reverse proxy and SSL certificates for the IIS component of the app server.
2. Created improved group policy objects including:
   1. Mapping network drives with the %username% wildcard to ensure that my domain users can access their network resources.
   2. Securing Windows 10 by using group policy to remove Cortana web searches and fixing other privacy related issues in Windows 10.
3. Created a new Domain controller on my parents subnet.

Point 3, above, was easier than I expected. I had already created a VPN tunnel between the networks some time ago. Both sites have TP-Link 1043ND routers with OpenWRT installed. As such I was able to have the routers handle ‘routing’ using BGP. At this point, only the new DC server is using my local DNS server. Moving forward, I will setup the new DC server as a DNS server too.

The new DC server is running on my parent’s KVM host/media server (Typhoon). I’ve enabled easy access to the Hypervisor by installling virt-manager on my Ubuntu desktop and installing ssh keys on both Atlas and Typhoon.