The Biggie role: Active Directory

Congratulations! Your server should be all ready to be promoted to the first Domain Controller, thus creating your network domain!

To start, go to that "Initial Server Configuration" window and choose "Add Role". This time, select "Active Directory Domain Services".

It will give you some good general information and probably tell you there are some .net frameworks you need to install. Let it do so. Now what it's actually doing is kind of installing the installation files for Active Directory...it's not actually setting up the domain yet. One of those pieces of information it gave you was that once this is done, we'll have to run dcpromo.exe.

So, once that wizard starts, click start and type in "dcpromo" without the quotes, then hit Enter.

Now it ask you what domain you want to create (note that with Foundation edition, you can't make it a sub-domain - it has to be the root of your domain), then it will be using DNS to go out and find out who is "in charge" of the domain. Since you've configured it to use itself as the DNS server to ask, and you've also told it to respond to any requests for information about your domain name with information pointing to itself, it will get the answer back, "I am!". At that point, it allows you to create the domain and you're off and running. There are a few more questions it will ask you (passwords, etc), but you should be able to walk through the wizard fairly easily. Once it's done, it will naturally require a restart, after which your domain has been created.