[Samba] Moving domain from one samba box to another

[James Murray]

I have searched for the answer but have only found others asking...

I have been running Samba successfully for ten years now, with approx 50
clients hanging off a Solaris box running Samba 2.2.6. The mixed network of
95/98/2000/XP machines were logging into the Samba domain fine and roaming
profiles were functional. We do not have any Windows server machines on
this site.

I decided to upgrade the Solaris machine and bought a Dell machine running
Redhat Linux ES 3.0. This is now running Samba 3.0.2

I have migrated the file serving to the new machine but I am stumped on how
to cleanly move the domain serving and all of the roamed profiles.

In a period of downtime I tried disabling the old server and setting the
new one as the PDC but when I tried to login from an XP client it reported
"cannot find the domain" I had copied the smbpasswd across with the machine
trust accounts.
Dis-joining and re-joining the domain allowed me to then login but I had
lost my profile.

>From the information I have gleaned it would appear that one route might be:
-take copy of smbpassed
-reset all user passwords (about 50) to known value
-login to one machine as all user accounts in turn (to save roaming profile)
-disjoin from domain
-swap PDC function between servers
-rejoin new domain
-login to machine as all user accounts in turn (to create blank profile)
(-edit user registry to change profile location)?
-login in Administrator and copy all user profiles onto new server
-for each client PC disjoin and rejoin domain
-restore all user passwords

While this seems possible it is a good day's work - hopefully I have missed
something obvious.

suggestions welcomed

James Murray
Stokes Forgings Ltd
01922 704800 / 01384 342550