Zix

The DNS issue here is pretty easy to fix, especially considering that it sounds like you don't have any internal DNS servers running at the moment. The internal DNS name you use is completely up to you, there are a couple suggestions you might want to follow; -First, you can use a subdomain or your current Internet domain name, meaning that if your Internet domain name is currently "company.com", you could use the domain name "AD.company.com" or "corp.company.com" to start the Active Directory structure. -Second, you can use the ".local" namespace. So, if your company domain name again is "company.com", then your internal namespace would be "company.local" I personally, prefer the ".local" namespace because it easily distinguishes internal vs. external resources. And the ".local" namespace is a private namespace that will not be resolved by any Internet DNS servers, it's like using a private address space (10.x.x.x, etc...) When you install Active Directory on Windows 2000/2003 server, the AD Installation Wizard will ask for the address of your primary internal DNS server, if you don't have one the Wizard will setup one for you on the server you are installing AD on. This option works just fine. To allow yourself Internet capability, all you need to do is configure your Internal DNS server to forward any unknown name resolution requests to your ISP's external DNS server. When you do this, your Internal DNS server will handle all internal name resolution for all local resources, and the ISP DNS server will handle all external name resolution for all Internet resources. One thing though, when you have the AD-installation wizard install DNS for you, it will create a "." zone. You need to delete the "." zone to configure your DNS server to forward. The reason for this is because the "." zone references your DNS server as a root DNS server. Your DNS server is NOT a root DNS server sao you can safely delete the "." zone and the check box to enable forwarding will be available. Good luck and enjoy! If you have any specific questions on this, let me know and I can go into further detail.

The Winnt.SIF file is only used when you want to automate setup when booting from the CD-ROM. To help automate the Sysprep mini-setup wizard, you need to create a Sysprep.INF file. This file can be created using the SetupMGR.exe utility found on the CD-ROM in the Support\Tools\Deploy.CAB file. You need to place the Sysprep.INF file in the C:\Sysprep folder on the image computer. You can use it to define the common variable asked, and leave the computer specific variables blank, setup will stop on the blank variables and ask you to fill them in.