This project was one of the first major steps in building my home lab environment. The goal was to recreate a small business server infrastructure based on my real professional experience as an IT Technician.
At work, I previously deployed a Debian Linux server as an additional Active Directory Domain Controller for an existing Windows SBS 2008 R2 environment. In this project, I decided to go one step further and build a complete small business infrastructure based entirely on Linux Ubuntu Server 16.04 LTS and Samba4.
Hardware:
- HP Microserver G7 N54L
- 120GB Kingston SSD (Operating System)
- 2x 320GB WD SATA drives (RAID1 data storage)
- 2x 8GB Kingston DDR3 ECC RAM
- Ubuntu Server 16.04 LTS
- Samba4 Active Directory Domain Controller
- DNS and NTP services
- Group Policy Management (GPO)
- Roaming Profiles
- RAID1 storage
- Backup services
- NextCloud private cloud
- CUPS print server
- Active Directory Users and Computers
- DNS Management
- Group Policy Management
The server was configured as the main Active Directory Domain Controller using Samba4. I created domain users, shared folders, roaming profile paths, and centralized authentication for Windows clients.
Windows clients were joined to the domain, and I used RSAT tools from Windows workstations to manage services such as:
From time to time, I also used the samba-tool command-line utility directly on the Ubuntu server for administration tasks.
After the domain environment was working correctly, I deployed NextCloud on the same server and integrated it with Samba4 and Active Directory authentication. This allowed domain users to access their files both through standard network shares and through the NextCloud web interface.
The final step was deploying a CUPS print server and sharing a network printer for domain users.
This project helped me better understand Linux administration, Active Directory concepts, Samba4 integration, centralized management, and self-hosted infrastructure.
