A hands-on help desk lab built on top of an Active Directory environment. This project simulates real IT support work — submitting tickets, troubleshooting issues, making fixes in Active Directory, and documenting everything clearly.
The ticketing system is Spiceworks Cloud Help Desk, which runs in the browser on the host machine. The actual fixes happen inside VirtualBox VMs running Windows Server and Windows 11. That separation is intentional — it mirrors how real help desk environments work.
- Working tickets from submission through to resolution in Spiceworks
- Unlocking accounts and resetting passwords in Active Directory
- Fixing shared folder access by managing group membership
- Basic DNS and network troubleshooting
- Verifying domain communication between VMs
- Documenting technical work in Markdown
| Tool | Purpose |
|---|---|
| Spiceworks Cloud Help Desk | Ticketing system (technician view + user portal) |
| Windows Server 2025 (VirtualBox VM) | Domain Controller — Active Directory and DNS |
| Windows 11 (VirtualBox VM) | Domain-joined client machine |
| Oracle VirtualBox | VM hypervisor |
| GitHub | Project documentation and portfolio |
You run two browser tabs on your host machine. In one tab you're the end user submitting a ticket through the Spiceworks user portal. In the other tab you're the technician receiving and working the ticket. When a fix needs to be made — unlocking an account, resetting a password, updating group membership — you switch into the Windows Server VM and do it in Active Directory. Then you come back to Spiceworks and close out the ticket.
| Ticket | Issue | Resolution |
|---|---|---|
| IT-001 | Account lockout — user locked out of domain account | Unlocked account via Unlock-ADAccount in PowerShell |
| IT-002 | DNS issue — client unable to resolve domain name | Verified DNS settings and restored connectivity |
| IT-003 | Password reset — user forgot domain password | Reset password and forced change at next login via AD |
| IT-004 | Shared folder access — user denied access to HR folder | Added user to HR Shared Folder Access security group |
- documentation/ — the full lab walkthrough guide
- tickets/ — individual markdown files for each completed support ticket
- screenshots/ — all lab screenshots organized by setup phase
The full step-by-step setup guide for this lab lives here:
This lab builds on top of my Active Directory Homelab. If you want to see how the underlying environment was set up, check that out first: