Fair enough… Thoughts & screenshots;
1. What rolls are installed… main one I’m looking for is dns as you need that so that the computers know where the server is. The default address should be the servers’ internal ip and not the default local which the wizard will put in if you didn’t adjust it. Example something like 192.168.10.10 is ok but 127.0.0.1 will cause you no end of issues down the road.
2. They can see each other by ping and the server… a good start, but are they on the domain? Ping and even access to shares does not in itself confirm this.
Open the server and “active directory users and computers” open the domain icon and find “computers”… any computer that has ever been on this domain will be listed here.
3. The shares has a few options so;
a. Open Shared by “computer management”… shares listed here can be seen by other computers on the network.
b. Open Shared by “server management” … shares listed here can be seen by other users on the domain.
In both cases a share with a
$ will be hidden and Server 8r2 (
by default) turns off network detection to windows 7 machines.
c. As you can find the shares already your final choice to make is the domain connection type and there are two main picks:
C1. Track/ connect by computer… on a small network like yours the advantage is simplicity i.e. only 7 computers so you can make a group policy that maps the server shares automatically as these computers login to the server (
which can also happen by auto)… the xp machines require some extra mucking around but its still doable.
C2. Track/ connect by users… this does take more time to set up but you can then centralize the documents i.e Fred logs in the computer 1 and saves a file to his “my documents” folder then moves to computer 2 and the files are waiting for him on that machines “my documents” folder… again the xp machines pre-date this stuff making extra mucking around needed.
Other thoughts: Server 8r2 is already well out of date so that’s not going to give you much future padding… I get you still have xp but any new machine you add later will be at least 7 with 8, 8.1 or even 10 becoming more and more likely as time goes by. From my experience I can confirm 7 is fine but connecting any of the 8’s to a server 8r2 is a major shit fight. I would suggest looking into Hyper-v as you can grab the (
free) download iso and install that on just about anything that has a 64bit (
AMD or intel) chip, intel gigabit-network card (
$10) and at least 4g of ram but it’s your life mate and
good luck with it.