Recently, I stumbled on an initiative called "The Auror Project" by Sudarshan Pisupati which was starting a course called "3 Machine Labs". "3 Machine Labs" is a challenge based learning approach to solidify fundamentals of Active Directory over a series of 9 sessions.

The first session came with a challenge to automate the process of building an Active Directory Lab with some specifications.

Automation should:

• Setup two Virtual Machines; Windows Server & Windows 10
• Install Active Directory Domain Services(ADDS) on the Windows Server and promote the server to Domain controller through a process called DC Promo
• Add Windows 10 machine to Windows Server domain, through a process called Domain join

Some specifications for the machines were: For Windows Server (Domain controller):

• Domain name should be "auror.local"
• Has DNS role
• Contains a Domain user called "Adam" with password "Pass@123"

For Windows 10:

• Should've Google Chrome installed
• User "Adam" should be configured as a local administrator
• Firewall should be disabled

1. Download the ISO files in the main(Auror-Project) directory

2. Build ISO using packer with packer build server-2019.json & packer build win10.json

   or

   Even better if you run .\packer-build.bat to run both the packer builds parallely.(On windows ofc, for Linux you can use nohup <cmd> &)

   which contains:

   start cmd /K "cd Packer\server-2019 && packer build server-2019.json"
   start cmd /K "cd Packer\win10 && packer build win10.json"

   Output:

   Build will take sometime and should look like this:

   My build finished in ~20 mins.

3. Now, We've to configure the built base images with vagrant to build our environment.

   cd Vagrant && vagrant up

My Vagrant took 38 minutes to set up the environment. Taking it as ~40 mins.

There it is.. Complete lab from scratch in your fingertips within 60 mins.

Blog post giving a detailed look for Task I here.