My Corner of the Interweb

Tomorrow's the day.

Mood: Focused. And nervous.
Music: Sabotage, Beastie Boys.
Game: World of Warcraft, Planetside, Call of Duty, Auto Assault Beta.
Book: None.
Muffin: None.
Punchline: Nope.

I am working from home right now.

I am doing that because I am reading and searching for any hints, tips, steps, or words of advice on migrating an NT4.0 domain to a Windows Server 2003 AD domain.

Tomorrow at 2pm, I will be taking down the servers, and running dcpromo on the Windows 2003 Server.

I expect to have to create DNS entries in my DNS server, recreate all user accounts, and recreate the security model IF things don't go well.

If I am not careful, I could, in theory, lock myself out of every server in the network. This would be the worst case scenario. Rebuilding both servers from backups does not appeal to me.

If everything goes well, I will create a new domain in a new forest, migrate over the user names and passwords and security model, and take down the old server. This has a very small chance of working the way I expect it.

The way I EXPECT things to go is:
- I run dcpromo, create the AD on the 2003 server, configure some DNS goodies, and the new domain will exist. At this time, no one will be able to log in to the file server.
- I will recreate groups and a few accounts on the 2003 server.
- I will attempt to migrate my laptop to the new domain, and note the process that allows me to be a part of the new domain, yet lets me keep my machine local profile intact.
- If and when this works, I will recreate the security hierarchy on the 2003 server.
- I will then recreate all the user accounts (using a new name structure...NT only allowed 8 character logons....)
- Then I will spend the rest of the night creating the trust relationship between the new server and the client machines, of which there are about 50 of them.

If all goes well, I will probably NOT have to work this weekend. If things go poorly, I could very well be spending my entire weekend in a server room.

The problem, as you probably could guess, is that there is absolutely no information on doing this migration safely or properly. The reason for this is, aside from the fact that it's Microsoft, that I suspect that Microsoft prevents putting any really detailed documentation on the web because they want you to shell out thousands of bucks for the MCSE courses, and/or buy hundred-dollar step by step books.

You might make the argument that IF this is so important, Glenn, buy the fucking books, and/or take the course. To which I can only reply: I don't have time for that. The PDC is definitely on its last legs, I am constantly rebooting it just to get it to do the simplest of tasks. Hardware-wise, the machine is SIX years old, and hasn't been turned off for more than 10 minutes since it was built. (Aside from the blackout....) Software-wise, the machine hasn't been properly cleaned and patched for years...since before I got there. (As a rule, I don't go patching servers I didn't build. Who the fuck KNOWS what they've got running in there.) And since the entire office was running off that server up until a few weeks ago, there was no good way to check it out.

So I'm basically pretending I've had a catastrophic failure, and need to rebuild from scratch.

All the data is moved, including the accounting database and virus servers. All that's left is the user/security database....

So I'm home scouring the web looking for any small bit of advice that will save me tens of hours of recovery. Because if I were at work, I'd never be able to sit still for more than twenty minutes without being interrupted.

So wish me luck tomorrow.

Or I'll see you in a week.

Posted by Glenn at August 18, 2005 09:33 AM